Improving the Hospital Quality of Care during Winter Periods by Optimizing Budget Allocation Between Rotavirus Vaccination and Bed Expansion

Dort, Thibaut; Schecroun, Nadia; Standaert, Baudouin

Similarly, due to the baseline assumption of constant returns to scale a ceteris paribus variation in targeted QoC improvement will generate an exactly proportional variation in the optimal allocation components. For example, increasing the QoC improvement target from 50 to 75% (i.e., a 50%-or 25% point-increase) would also generate a 50% increase in the optimal vaccine coverage, extra hospital beds, and minimum budget needed. However, the impact of such an increase in model outcomes is assessed for illustration purposes only since the Belgian study reported an improvement of more than 100% in hospital QoC-scores after the introduction of rotavirus vaccination [4] . Finally, since the vaccine coverage achieved is above 85% when introducing the rotavirus vaccination in Belgium [11] , the corresponding percentage of extra beds needed to reach a 50% QoC-score improvement is also calculated.