Oregon Saludable: Juntos Podemos
infection
INFECTION
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, negative health burdens have fallen disproportionately on Latinx communities, which have experienced higher infection and mortality rates (Gil et al., Reducing health disparities through more equitable access to SARS-CoV-2 testing is a central goal of the National Institutes of health Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics for Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) program (Tromberg et al., Algorithmically, selecting potential SARS-CoV-2 testing sites can be considered a facility location problem (FLP) (Weber, Although the use of FLP algorithms would appear to have high translational value to the field of prevention science given its focus on delivering interventions to underserved populations, we were unable to locate any publication discussing the success or failure of the FLP approach with respect to the delivery of health services and behavioral intervention for Latinx communities. A priori, it is unclear if the site locations provided by these algorithms would be actionable for SARS-CoV-2 testing because identified locations must still agree to host testing. It is also unknown if applying these algorithms would yield better utilization of SARS-CoV-2 testing by our focal population. The aim of this paper is to address this gap by presenting an FLP proposal method within a community-informed process and provide software and guidance to other groups wishing to implement similar methods. The proposed algorithm provides an opportunity for data-informed decision-making in partnership with community-based organizations. The process of sharing information with partners to make decisions about where to provide testing services reflects specific values (i.e., reaching the Latinx community) encoded by our model’s optimization goal. After presenting the FLP method, we present a post-hoc analysis demonstrating that improved site locations as estimated by the algorithm are strongly correlated with an increase in SARS-CoV-2 testing utilization by the Latinx community in Oregon.