EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Optimizing the Finnish colorectal cancer population screening program with decision programming

Lauri Neuvonen, Mary Dillon, Eeva Vilkkumaa, Ahti Salo, Maija Jäntti and Sirpa Heinävaara

European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 327, issue 1, 295-308

Abstract: In Finland, colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence rates have steadily increased over the last decades and as of 2020, CRC is the second most common cancer in both males and females. CRC is a crucial concern for the public health of Finland, highlighted by the recent implementation of a national population screening program. In this paper, we optimize the screening test positivity cut-off levels and the use of potential incentives for stratified populations to minimize cancer prevalence. The optimization results, computed with the novel Decision Programming approach for discrete multi-stage decision problems under uncertainty, show the optimal cut-off levels and uses of incentives for Finnish target groups subject to different constraints on colonoscopy capacity. The outcomes of these optimal strategies are estimated to determine the expected corresponding prevalences of CRC and required colonoscopies, and expected third-party costs. Finally, measures describing different equality perspectives are presented.

Keywords: OR in health services; Colorectal cancer screening; Optimization; Influence diagrams; Decision programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221725002875
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:327:y:2025:i:1:p:295-308

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.04.022

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-08-29
Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:327:y:2025:i:1:p:295-308