Description of availability of medical care with Fuzzy logic for logistic optimization of medical resources

The aim of this research is to improve health service delivery in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa by application of resource allocation via Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In many of those rural pilot areas a limited availability of medical resources, i.e. limited access of the population to medical resources, can be found. The main topic of this paper is the description of the spatial availability of medical resources with Fuzzy Logic membership functions. Ministries of Health (MoH) can profit from the visualized description of availability in order to support logistic optimization of limited medical resources. A patient can profit from the visualized description of the availability of medical resources on a mobile device, as he knows where to go in order to obtain a demanded result. As a result more people will have access to the same amount of logistically optimized limited resources. The improvement of health service delivery depends amongst other things on the improvement of the availability of limited medical resources. The challenge of performing reasonable logistic optimization is, to revert to well-founded spatial resource data in the analyzed area. In reality, spatial resource data in rural areas often is not well founded, only discrete and not continuous. In this paper it is shown how Fuzzy logic membership function can be used to describe the availability of medical resources also for discrete data input. The Fuzzy Logic membership functions induce a continuous spatial measure of availability of a resource from completely available to completely unavailable. After the determination of the continuous spatial availability of medical resources in pilot areas with Fuzzy Logic, it will be possible to perform better logistic optimization, which is processed in GIS.