Estimating Oxygen Needs for Childhood Pneumonia in Developing Country Health Systems: A New Model for Expecting the Unexpected

摘要

BackgroundPlanning for the reliable and cost-effective supply of a health service commodity such as medical oxygen requires an understanding of the dynamic need or ‘demand’ for the commodity over time. In developing country health systems, however, collecting longitudinal clinical data for forecasting purposes is very difficult. Furthermore, approaches to estimating demand for supplies based on annual averages can underestimate demand some of the time by missing temporal variability.