Designing primary health care financing strategies for low-income communities of Rio De Janeiro: A heuristic solution

TLDR: In this paper, a heuristic method was used for selecting schemes by which communities might finance, in full or in part, their own primary health care (PHC) services in developing countries often requires decisions to be made under complex circumstances and without full supporting data or adequate computational resources.

Abstract: Planning primary health care (PHC) services in developing countries often requires decisions to be made under complex circumstances and without full supporting data or adequate computational resources. Intuitive approaches in the spirit of operations research/management science models, termed heuristics, may prove useful in such situations. This paper describes a heuristic method used for selecting schemes by which communities might finance, in full or in part, their own PHC services. In low-income areas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, groups of service providers and consumers were asked to identify possible PHC financing schemes. They then chose a “best” subset of these schemes using methods which involved expressing their preferences, evaluating social and other constraints, and judging possible usefulness of outcomes. A sensitivity analysis showed that the model led to similar sets of chosen schemes independent of variations in selected inputs.