Location optimization of drug take-back boxes in the state of Pennsylvania

The Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) crisis in the USA poses one of the greatest public health problems(Hodder et al., 2021), just in 2019 72.9% out of the 70,630 overdose deaths in the US were caused by opioids (CDC, 2021). One of the most important strategies to tackle OUD is the creation of community-based programs with only a few of them being objectively evaluated (Leece et al., 2019). PROSPER being is an evidence-based model which delivers scientifically proven, high-quality programs for communities has delivered several projects, one of them being the creation of new drug take-back boxes in collaboration with Penn State University Engineering students (R. Spoth & Greenberg, 2011; Wagner, 2020). The problem posed in this thesis is the need to locate a limited number of boxes in a way that the availability and coverage is maximized, taking into consideration that the box should be located in a secure and public place and in some cases considering other factors as Population rate, Dispensation rate, OD death rate, DUD rate, ED visit rate, number of boxes already in the county and the percentage to reach the goal, for which 4 optimization models were created. Two of the models had a county level scope then selecting the zip codes to be covered and the other two working directly with zip code, the other difference is that two of the models only focus on maximizing the population covered while the other two focus both in the population and all the other factor previously mentioned. The results rendered by the models place model 2 as the one that better increases the coverage of the population, both by the county average and total population, nevertheless model 4 has also a great coverage increase, but also considering all the additional factors that make it a mor relevant and adequate model for the purpose of combating the OUD crisis in the state of Pennsylvania.

https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-4549-7466