Optimizing Jumper Notification Timing to Minimize Vaccine Waste and Requester Waiting Time

Vaccination sites face the operational decision of determining the timing for notifying standby recipients (“jumpers”) to claim doses that would otherwise expire. Such timing decisions arise broadly in health-security operations involving perishable medical resources and responses to emerging health threats. This study formulates and analyzes a simulation-based model to evaluate notification policies within a framework defined by dose supply and site throughput levels. The notification policy is represented as a threshold based on the fraction of a dose’s remaining shelf life at which a jumper is alerted, and policy performance is measured using an objective function defined as the sum of average dose wait time and average requester wait time. We develop a sample-average approximation procedure to obtain performance bounds and optimality gaps, and subsequently relax key baseline assumptions through robustness analyses that examine time-varying requester arrivals modeled as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process, alternative jumper travel-time distributions, pooled jumper configurations, and alternative value weights capturing equity-efficiency preferences. Across the baseline and extended analyses, notification timing and system performance exhibit a nonmonotonic relationship. When supply is scarce, system performance varies little across notification thresholds, with later notification offering practical protection of priority access. Under balanced supply and demand, notifications near midshelf life typically perform well. When supply is abundant, higher-throughput sites benefit from earlier notification to reduce the risk of expiration. In many scenarios, a range of policies yields statistically indistinguishable performance, indicating robust near-best policies. The study provides a health decision analysis framework to help vaccination sites select notification thresholds tailored to their supply conditions and operational capacity, offering practical guidance for balancing equitable access with the efficient use of expiring healthcare resources.