Using operations research to solve the chronic disease epidemic
Welcome! My name is Katherine Adams
As a woman from a developing country, I am dedicated to fighting health inequality on a global scale.
Contact me at kbadams (at) wisc (dot) edu
The diabetes epidemic claims millions of lives prematurely each year.
This global problem requires the use of advanced analytics employed from a systems view. As a PhD candidate in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I am developing optimization models to tackle the diabetes epidemic. I am advised by Profs. Justin Boutilier and Yonatan Mintz and also work in collaboration with Prof. Sarang Deo at the Indian School of Business.
When resources are scarce, efficient health intervention planning is crucial
Optimization is essential to address global health problems in resource-limited settings. Seeking to improve patient outcomes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), we contribute to the growing academic literature on global health operations. This area includes topics such as emergency response in LMICs, supply chain management for medication distribution, HIV screening for newborns, inventory management for humanitarian operations, among others.
Optimization provides a scalable, data-driven approach to plan community interventions efficiently
LMICs are expected to experience the greatest increase in chronic disease burden as a share of their overall health burden. They are also the countries least prepared for it in terms of their health system capacity (Bollyky et al. 2017). This is where community health workers (CHWs) come in. CHWs are members of the community who promote health education, provide social support, and perform simple medical tasks such as blood glucose screening.
While they can fill in gaps in healthcare access, the World Health Organization has stressed the need for more research to study the design, implementation, and performance of CHW programs. Our current research project seeks to address this gap through a novel optimization approach to build personalized diabetes screening and treatment plans to be carried out by CHWs.
Prior research
Click on the images to be redirected to each publication:
Conservation planning
Job-shop scheduling