VaxiMap: optimal delivery of vaccinations for housebound patients
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Abstract
Background
Throughout the UK’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign, responsibility for vaccinating housebound patients has rested with individual GP surgeries, posing them a difficult logistical challenge (the travelling salesman problem). In response to demand from GPs, and a lack of existing solutions tailored specifically to vaccination, VaxiMap was created. This tool provides optimal routes for vaccine delivery and has been free to all users since its inception in January 2021.
Methods
VaxiMap generates optimal routes subject to the constraint that the number of patients per route should be fixed. This ensures that a known quantity of vaccine can be set aside for each route and minimises wastage. The user need only upload an Excel spreadsheet of patient postcodes to be visited. A divide-and-conquer approach of iterative k -means clustering followed by within-cluster route optimisation is used to generate the routes.
Findings
We find substantial savings in the time taken to plan vaccinations, as well as savings in the time taken to visit housebound patients. We estimate total savings to date of 4,700 hours of practitioner time, equivalent to 2.5 work-years, or approximately £91k at typical practitioner salaries.
Interpretation
The adoption of VaxiMap yielded both time and cost savings for GP surgeries and accelerated the UK’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign at a critical moment.
Funding
Financial support for VaxiMap was provided by Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford University Innovation, and JHubMed, part of UK Strategic Command. These parties were not involved in the preparation of this manuscript.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.20.21267978: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources This is achieved via Microsoft Bing’s mapping API, making use of the optimise waypoints facility (which imposes a limit of 25 patients per group) [6]. Microsoft Bing’ssuggested: NoneThe problem solved by VaxiMap is subtly different to the conventional TSP investigated in the literature because users start with a text-based list of addresses (i.e, from an EMIS database) as opposed to a visual representation. VaxiMapsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques …SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.20.21267978: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources This is achieved via Microsoft Bing’s mapping API, making use of the optimise waypoints facility (which imposes a limit of 25 patients per group) [6]. Microsoft Bing’ssuggested: NoneThe problem solved by VaxiMap is subtly different to the conventional TSP investigated in the literature because users start with a text-based list of addresses (i.e, from an EMIS database) as opposed to a visual representation. VaxiMapsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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