Research to weigh best methods to spend government funds to fight opioid addiction

Dealing with the opioid epidemic in the U.S. has been a legal and healthcare challenge for more than 20 years, but figuring out the right approach to mitigate it has proved difficult.

A Binghamton University faculty member will lead new research that aims to provide better guidance for policymakers.

Assistant Professor Ankit Bansal from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering recently won a $244,008 grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a study of how counties in West Virginia allocate their funding to mitigate the opioid crisis.

“The approaches to mitigating the opioid crisis have been focused on supply-side interdiction strategies, which means policing and law enforcement activities, and demand-side interdiction, which is focused on prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery,” Bansal said. “How do you understand the interaction between these two approaches? How do you combine them to present a holistic approach to handle or mitigate the impact of the opioid crisis?”

Bansal will collaborate with researchers at two other schools: West Virginia University (where he spent a year on the faculty before coming to Binghamton in fall 2022) will collect the data, and the University of Minnesota (where he did postdoc research) will help with analysis.

“The NSF put out a call for projects focused on disrupting operations of illicit supply networks, and we saw this opportunity to work together and submit a proposal where we each use our skills,” Bansal said.

Among the data points collected through criminal databases and public health records are drug arrests, overdoses, opioid deaths and rehabilitation programs. Bansal and his team will use optimization and machine learning to recommend what mix of funding gives the best results.

“The reason we consider a county as a good unit is because different counties have different priorities, so they may have different budget allocations,” he said.

During his two years of postdoc research at the University of Minnesota, Bansal collaborated with the world-famous Mayo Clinic. That’s where he started using discrete optimization, which deals with finite resources, to solve scheduling and allocation problems in healthcare delivery systems.

Ultimately, an in-depth analysis of West Virginia’s opioid data and what offers the best “return on investment” to help the most people could aid local officials around the U.S. to make better choices about how they spend their limited funding.

“Industrial engineering is very versatile and has lots of applications,” Bansal said. “It can be implemented to solve pressing issues in many different fields.”