Improving Access to Essential Medicines via Decision-Aware Machine Learning

A critical challenge in healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce resources, particularly essential medicines.

This problem is complicated by limited high-quality data, which restricts the applicability of traditional data-driven techniques.

We propose a novel decision-aware machine learning framework for essential medicines allocation, which additionally leverages multi-task learning to ensure sample efficiency and catalytic priors to ensure equitable allocation.

In collaboration with the Sierra Leone national government, we performed a staggered, nationwide deployment of our system as a decision support tool.

Our econometric evaluation finds an estimated 19% increase in consumption of allocated products in treated districts, demonstrating its efficacy at improving access to essential medicines.

Our tool was subsequently scaled nationwide, covering an estimated 2 million women and children under five.

Our work demonstrates how machine learning methods can improve efficiency at very low cost in resource-constrained global health settings.