The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy maintains a web site called Promising Practices: Pandemic Preparedness Tools. One can download the practices directly from this web site.
The practices, developed by different states and local jurisdictions, are organized into the following topics: types of patient care, communication, community disease mitigation, and helping at-risk groups. The practices are also organized by the states that developed them.
The September-October 2009 issue of Interfaces is the special issue with the 2008 Wagner Prize Papers.
The paper Modeling and Optimizing the Public Health Infrastructure for Emergency Response, by Eva K. Lee, Chien-Hung Chen, Ferdinand Pietz, and Bernard Benecke, is a useful overview of the models that this group has developed in collaboration with public health officials around the nation. The RealOpt system can “minimize staff required at various stations in point-of-dispensing (POD) locations to meet throughput requirements, determine the number and locations of the PODs to minimize cost of operations while ensuring acceptable travel times and distances, and help evaluate facility design and flow strategies within a POD to mitigate the spread of disease.”
It is great to see this valuable work getting important recognition by the broader operations research community.
This week at the INFORMS Annual Meeting here in San Diego there have been some interesting talks on public health preparedness.
At the University of South Florida, Tapas Das is leading a team with experts in industrial engineering, public health, and medical anthropology to develop surveillance and simulation techniques to build a real-time mitigation strategy for pandemics that can begin optimizing the response to an outbreak as soon as it appears.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a guide entitled Mass Medical Care with Scarce Resources: the Essentials. It is an abridged and updated version of the original guide, which was published in 2007.
The guide includes material on influenza pandemic preparedness in order to apply the principles, and this section has links to influenza-specific resources such as training guides, guidelines, checklists, and similar material for hospitals, alternative care sites, and other health services. The guide also discusses ethical and legal issues.
With respect to the vaccine for the novel H1N1 influenza, recent studies have shown that children 9 and under will need two shots, while children 10 and over will need only one shot.
We have updated the Vaccine Allocation Model to reflect this new data. In Version 3.0, one can set the number of doses per person for each target group separately. Thus, one can specify the number of children 9 and under and their need for 2 shots per child and enter the number of children 10 and over and their need for only 1 shot per child. The population of other target groups can be entered as well.
The Vaccine Allocation Model is intended to help public health officials determine how many persons in different target groups can receive treatment. This software, implemented in a Microsoft Excel workbook, is provided free of charge for use by public health emergency preparedness planners. Go to the model download page to get the model and its user guide.
CDC’s Division of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) is looking for state and local SNS planners to help test the beta version of a new release of TourSolver. Toursolver can be used to find optimal truck routes for delivering medication to PODs. Anyone interested in being a beta tester should contact Rick Pietz at eoj3@cdc.gov to schedule a testing session.
The INFORMS podcast site now has a podcast by Sheldon Jacobson that discusses the role of operations research to improve the definition of vaccines and the delivery of medication.
CDC’s Division of the Strategic National Stockpile (DSNS) will conduct a webinar on RealOpt at 2:00 PM ET this Wednesday, September 2, 2009. RealOpt is a simulation-based optimization software that can help planners design PODs that run more efficiently and achieve desired throughput rates while operating with fewer staff. Contact Allison Cain at frt5@cdc.gov for details on how to participate.
We recently worked with a local school district that is planning Flumist clinics in which a batch of 15 students arrives every 5 minutes. You can find the complete clinic planning model that we created online at the Clinic Planning Model Generator software page. The clinic includes a forms check station and a vaccination (flu mist) station.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has released a report assessing the government’s preparations for the resurgence of the H1N1 influenza this fall.
The report describes a “plausible scenario” in which 30 to 50% of Americans are infected, as many as 1.8 million people are admitted to the hospital, 300,000 patients require fill the available intensive care units, and between 30,000 and 90,000 Americans die from the flu.
An interesting point concerns the timing of vaccinations: the report states that the surge in the flu could begin in September and peak in mid-October, but the vaccines may not be available until mid-October.
The report also recommends changes to the decision-making processes so that a single individual is “responsible for coordinating all policy development for the 2009-H1N1 response; identifying the people, agencies, and processes for making key decisions; guaranteeing that all necessary decisions are made in a timely manner; and presenting recommended courses of action to the President.”
The report is online here.
