can OR reduce health disparities?

I am enjoying the Virginia Health Equity Conference.  It’s hard not to believe that operations research can be used to improve public health.

I particularly enjoyed Dr. Howard Frumkin’s keynote about public health and the built environment. His talk was particularly inspiring for operations researcher. We spend almost all of our time in built environments (home, school, work, transportation, parks), and there is an enormous body of research that suggests that our environment is a strong predictor of our health. Our built environment is the result of a series of decisions, some of which can be the result of good operations research and mathematical modeling. A good built environment offers a wide portfolio of public health benefits. Dr. Frumkin listed several opportunities for operations research modeling to improve our built environment (and in turn, public health), including:
• Investigating where to locate schools (perhaps using decision analysis),
• Improving school bus routes that are also safe (Safe Routes), including walking school bus routes (using network design),
• Improving and analyzing transportation networks in urban sprawl regions, which are plagued with low connectivity and low population density (this leads to a host of problems such as reliance on vehicles, low rates of physical exercise, poor access to emergency medical vehicles, etc.).
• Locating trees and green space in urban areas to “cover” poor neighborhoods.

Dr. Frumkin stressed that many of these decisions are generally not made by public health people (perhaps some can be made by operations researchers).