Track: Healthcare Operations and Services

Abstract

During the coronavirus disease of the 2019 pandemic, there was a shortage of ventilators to meet the medical demands of the United States hospitals. Coronavirus patients with severe conditions lose the ability to breathe by themselves and require a ventilator, which pumps air in and out of the lungs. The response to the ventilator shortage created many situations: Automakers started to manufacture ventilators to help the medical device companies grow ventilators production. Additionally, engineering students at different U.S. universities invented low-cost ventilators in university laboratories, and three-dimensional printed ventilators started to be manufactured. These solutions would be helpful in the long term. However, the urgent need for ventilators necessitates strategies for allocating these minimal available ventilators to assist the decision-makers and healthcare providers in U.S. hospitals. To compensate this challenge, proper resource allocation of ventilators makes the best use of these available ventilators to increase society's economic and ethical benefits. In this paper, two models of resource allocation will be studied: 1) A smart resource allocation advisor using the cost-benefit-analysis to allocate limited ventilators in a specific hospital, and 2) a stochastic optimization model for allocating and sharing ventilators among the states.