Decision Support for Allocating Scarce Drugs

The 1998 settlement of a lawsuit by the state of California required 19 pharmaceutical firms to provide $150 million worth of drugs free of charge to more than 150 California clinics and hospitals over a three-year period. We developed a decision-support system that utilizes a multiobjective optimization model and a heuristic solution taking into account the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of the drug-allocation process. As of November 2002, 90 percent of the total budget has been distributed to the various clinics with the help of this decision-support system.