Selecting pharmacies for COVID-19 testing to ensure access
Selecting pharmacies for COVID-19 testing to ensure access
Rapid diagnostic testing for COVID-19 is key to guiding social distancing orders and containing emerging disease clusters by contact tracing and isolation. However, communities throughout the US do not yet have adequate access to tests. Pharmacies are already engaged in testing, but there is capacity to greatly increase coverage. Using a facility location optimization model and willingness-to-travel estimates from US National Household Travel Survey data, we find that if COVID-19 testing became available in all US pharmacies, an estimated 94% of the US population would be willing to travel to obtain a test, if warranted. Whereas the largest chain provides high coverage in densely populated states, like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut, independent pharmacies would be required for sufficient coverage in Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. If only 1,000 ZIP code areas for pharmacies in the US are selected to provide testing, judicious selection, using our optimization model, provides estimated access to 29 million more people than selecting pharmacies simply based on population density.
COVID-19, Facility location optimization, Pharmacies, Points of dispensing, Test access, Test site selection
330-338
Risanger, Simon
c6a71850-0f4c-4cef-9b00-c0e143c8ede5
Singh, Bismark
9d3fc6cb-f55e-4562-9d5f-42f9a3ddd9a1
Morton, David
3e053a27-b1bb-4764-b807-c6ab0a133bbe
Meyers, Lauren Ancel
4f9ada54-8b4c-4607-ad88-dafb19fa06b3
10 January 2021
Risanger, Simon
c6a71850-0f4c-4cef-9b00-c0e143c8ede5
Singh, Bismark
9d3fc6cb-f55e-4562-9d5f-42f9a3ddd9a1
Morton, David
3e053a27-b1bb-4764-b807-c6ab0a133bbe
Meyers, Lauren Ancel
4f9ada54-8b4c-4607-ad88-dafb19fa06b3
Risanger, Simon, Singh, Bismark, Morton, David and Meyers, Lauren Ancel
(2021)
Selecting pharmacies for COVID-19 testing to ensure access.
Health Care Management Science, 24 (2), .
(doi:10.1007/s10729-020-09538-w).
Abstract
Rapid diagnostic testing for COVID-19 is key to guiding social distancing orders and containing emerging disease clusters by contact tracing and isolation. However, communities throughout the US do not yet have adequate access to tests. Pharmacies are already engaged in testing, but there is capacity to greatly increase coverage. Using a facility location optimization model and willingness-to-travel estimates from US National Household Travel Survey data, we find that if COVID-19 testing became available in all US pharmacies, an estimated 94% of the US population would be willing to travel to obtain a test, if warranted. Whereas the largest chain provides high coverage in densely populated states, like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut, independent pharmacies would be required for sufficient coverage in Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. If only 1,000 ZIP code areas for pharmacies in the US are selected to provide testing, judicious selection, using our optimization model, provides estimated access to 29 million more people than selecting pharmacies simply based on population density.
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More information
Accepted/In Press date: 30 November 2020
Published date: 10 January 2021
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
National Institutes of Health grants NIH R01 AI151176 and NIH U01 GM087791, U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant 2017-ST-061-QA0001 and Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
Funding Information:
The authors thank Dr. Gordon Wells for acquiring and sharing the pharmacy data set used in this study, and for providing additional pharmacy data sets that we considered. The authors are also grateful to John Sheffield and Mauricio Tec, who helped gather and share pharmacy data sets. We acknowledge financial support from the National Institutes of Health under Grant NIH R01 AI151176 and Grant NIH U01 GM087791, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant 2017-ST-061-QA0001 and Tito’s Handmade Vodka. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Funding Information:
The authors thank Dr. Gordon Wells for acquiring and sharing the pharmacy data set used in this study, and for providing additional pharmacy data sets that we considered. The authors are also grateful to John Sheffield and Mauricio Tec, who helped gather and share pharmacy data sets. We acknowledge financial support from the National Institutes of Health under Grant NIH R01 AI151176 and Grant NIH U01 GM087791, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant 2017-ST-061-QA0001 and Tito?s Handmade Vodka. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.
Keywords:
COVID-19, Facility location optimization, Pharmacies, Points of dispensing, Test access, Test site selection
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 472279
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/472279
ISSN: 1386-9620
PURE UUID: ff8b153d-492a-4024-9674-6050b8afa731
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Date deposited: 30 Nov 2022 17:45
Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 02:15
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Contributors
Author:
Simon Risanger
Author:
Bismark Singh
Author:
David Morton
Author:
Lauren Ancel Meyers
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