2022 Edelman Award Reprise: Winning team from Chile relives inspirational project, emotional win

Editor's Note: The 2022 Edelman Award winner also presented a reprise of the presentation covered below at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis.

To finish out a fantastic return to in-person INFORMS conferences, the 2022 Edelman Award winner Chile reprised their inspirational and well-deserved prize-winning presentation during the final day of the 2022 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference in Houston.

Erick Wikum, 2022 general chair, once again introduced the winning team by calling on his friend and co-chair of the INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, Juan Jaramillo, to properly introduce each of the 13 team members from Chile. The team includes members of the Chilean Ministries of Health and Science who partnered with Instituto Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería (ISCI) and telecom company Entel Ocean, as well as faculty members from Universidad de Chile and Stanford University.

The project won for improving pandemic responses in Chile during the COVID-19 pandemic, which included guidance on contagion prevention, vaccination and central management of ICU beds. The presentation shed light on mobility, ICU planning, testing and screening, and serology surveillance.

O.R. and analytics played a crucial role in Chile during a very difficult challenge and at a very critical moment. Collaboration among scientists, government and analytics professionals and researchers was key to the success of the project and saving lives in Chile.

Mobility

In 2020, when school closures were mandated and localized lockdowns began, COVID-19 cases were quickly growing in lower income areas and the lockdowns were too late to contain outbreaks. Marcelo Oliveres, researcher at ISCI, said the team needed to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of lockdowns and use mobility data to anticipate outbreaks. He started with reports in Google, which turned out not to be an adequate strategy because he needed details of transmission between areas, not just outbreaks in one area. Enter telecom company Entel, who allied with the Universidad de Chile to understand mobility during pandemic. The results allowed the team to transform data from mobile into a territorial dashboard and provided the foundation to build additional initiatives with the Ministries of Health and Science.

The team mapped movements to construct an origin matrix and implemented data aggregation to provide transparency to individuals on a publicly available platform, which became a useful tool for Paola Pontoni, Health Emergencies Director of Ministry of Health, to plan for lockdowns and whether they were effective. The platform also contributed to public policies developed in Chile during the pandemic.

ICU Allocation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals became one centralized system and a detailed forecast of beds needed in each region of the country was a necessity to for ICU capacity planning, which quickly became the first order of concern. To prepare forecasts, the team studied inbound and outbound flows of patients: symptomatic cases, the number in need of beds, and the number discharged. The system for generating data was under constant stress and in need of continuous learning due to the novelty of COVID-19. To accommodate, the team assembled a compartment model and implemented a forecasting system that resulted in bed capacity in even the most congested regions of Chile. Forecasts were run every two days during entire duration of the hospital crisis resulting in approximately 850 fewer deaths attributed this work.

Testing

Analytics was used to increase testing capacity in Chile, in particular, group/pool testing. Denis Sauré from ISCI took this from theory to practice and piloted COVID-19 testing at a long-term care facility, ultimately diagnosing people at a lower cost. Group testing accounted for 20% of the total testing in Chile, 50% increase in testing capacity and $90 million in savings. At the time, Chile was playing defense against COVID-19 cases and it was time to switch to offense by searching for cases. Especially asymptomatic cases. The team began placing PCR testing stations in public spaces. The system was built around an active screen index called the BAC index, weighting positivity and relative density of area from which the positive patient came. The index studies how disease moved in territories; it was not enough to simply know where they are or came from, the movement had to be studied. This data was then integrated into the Ministry of Health platform as heatmaps. The BAC index became a key component in active case screening. The heatmaps helped pinpoint and prioritize areas in need of testing, identify case clusters and possible outbreaks, and finally project future cases.

Serology Surveillance

In all areas, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was essential to contain the pandemic, but vaccine supply in Chile was uncertain. They did not have much access to mRNA vaccines and had to combine the use of vaccines with different technologies, which led to the Sinovac (CoronaVac) vaccine. This was the vaccine used to inoculate 75% of the Chilean population. Because this vaccine was unique, the team could not use international vaccine data to study its effectiveness. Miguel O’Ryan (Faculty of Medicine, Universidad de Chile) and a team of engineers had to monitor Sinovac. Testing stations were selected using integer programming, which provided population representation. A medical team ran the clinical study but actively collaborated with other teams to determine a third dose was needed for Sinovac. The national strategy led to 29,000 fewer infections and 1,000 fewer deaths.

Partnership & Impact

The success of the project was mainly due to the interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration focusing on national needs that occurred in a timely and positive manner. The team created reliable systems in record time that can now be used for other diseases or future pandemics.

According to Paula Daza, former Undersecretary of Health, the most important strategy was the development of heatmaps, in which analytics played a major role. The success of much of this work was due to the public-private partnership (PPP) and coordination between ISCI, academics, Entel and the Chilean government). These efforts can be used in the next stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the evidence-based decision-making can be used in future public policy or health emergencies. Chile can be an example of how science can be used in public policy.

The relationship between government and academia brought O.R. to the forefront. Even the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, noted the importance of this collaboration remarking, “This government will be at the service of science!”

All in all, the team, their project and its use of analytics, made a sizeable impact on many aspects, saving $207 million and 2,800 lives in Chile.