The widespread availability of cell phones has enabled non-profits to deliver critical health information to their beneficiaries in a timely manner. This paper describes our work to assist non-profits that employ automated messaging programs to deliver timely preventive care information to beneficiaries (new and expecting mothers) during pregnancy and after delivery. Unfortunately, a key challenge in such information delivery programs is that a significant fraction of beneficiaries drop out of the program. Yet, non-profits often have limited health-worker resources (time) to place crucial service calls for live interaction with beneficiaries to prevent such engagement drops. To assist non-profits in optimizing this limited resource, we developed a Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) system. One key technical contribution in this system is a novel clustering method of offline historical data to infer unknown RMAB parameters. Our second major contribution is evaluation of our RMAB system in collaboration with an NGO, via a real-world service quality improvement study. The study compared strategies for optimizing service calls to 23003 participants over a period of 7 weeks to reduce engagement drops. We show that the RMAB group provides statistically significant improvement over other comparison groups, reducing ~ 30% engagement drops. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating the utility of RMABs in real world public health settings. We are transitioning our RMAB system to the NGO for real-world use.
翻译:由于移动电话的广泛供应,非营利组织能够及时向受益人提供重要的健康信息。本文件描述了我们协助非营利组织的工作,这些非营利组织利用自动信息传送方案向怀孕和分娩后受益人(新母亲和预期母亲)及时提供预防性保健信息。不幸的是,这种信息提供方案面临的一个关键挑战是,相当一部分受益者退出方案。然而,非营利组织往往只有有限的保健工作者资源(时间),以提供关键服务,要求与受益人进行现场互动,以防止这种接触的下降。为协助非营利组织优化这一有限的资源,我们开发了一个不固定的多Armits(RMAB)系统。这个系统的一项关键技术贡献是,一种新型的离线历史数据组合方法,以推断出未知的RMAB参数。我们的第二个主要贡献是通过实际服务质量改善研究,对我们的RMAB系统进行评估。在7周内向23003名参与者发出优化服务呼吁,以减少接触。我们显示RMAB小组首次在统计上显著的改进了其他健康结构。我们的实际应用性研究正在减少我们的健康应用率的30。