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

A new way to analyze and optimize the healthcare budget for reaching specific health goals is presented here using a Cobb-Douglas-like power function [14] . Here, that function measures and combines extra treatment (more beds) with extra prevention (more vaccination) to get a substantial fixed improvement in hospital QoC-scores at the lowest investment needed [24, 25] . Previous studies have shown that the QoC in pediatric wards during winter periods is low [2, 4] . Many respiratory and gastroenteritis infections occur during those periods, leading to overcrowded pediatric units with high transmission rates of infections among those children [6, 11, 26] . Figure 5a shows for Jessa Hospital that the all-cause bed occupancy rates on average exceed the 85% threshold of safe and efficient operations during winter seasons [1] [2] [3] . The problem is recurrent yearly and only a few sustainable options can solve the issue: extra beds and/or reducing the bed demand through prevention. The baseline model setting presented here indicates that the minimum budget equally distributed among prevention and treatment is optimally allocated when it combines 64% coverage of rotavirus vaccination with 39% extra hospital beds for RVGE treatment during the peak periods, obtaining a 50% QoC improvement. The budget needed to be spent annually is around €1.05 million. The cost difference between vaccine coverage (C V ) and extra hospital beds (C H ) drives the results in their optimal budget allocation.