ALLOCATING SCARCE MEDICAL
RESOURCES
VIA RESERVE / CATEGORIZED PRIORITY SYSTEMS
Covid-19 has raised unprecedented challenges for medical rationing. Guidelines for medical rationing for scarce items like ventilators, antivirals, and vaccines now have to be converted to actual implementation plans.
This website provides a resource for practitioners who must implement actual rationing guidelines. The website is hosted up by a group of professors who are allocation experts who design and study non-price rationing mechanisms.
Our focus is on enabling practitioners to arrive on compromises between ethical goals using a reserve or categorized priority system. Compared to a commonly used priority system, a reserve or categorized priority system divides resources into multiple categories and uses different criteria for allocation of units in each category.
The website includes links to academic research, software implementation, and examples from the field on these systems. These resources are provided for general use. We have created this website using research funding from MIT and Boston College.
For more details, please contact Parag Pathak (MIT), Tayfun Sönmez (Boston College), Utku Ünver (Boston College).