Public Health Preparedness Modeling

A Clinic Planning Model can estimate the cycle time of a POD (clinic) – the average time that patients spend in the POD (from the time they arrive until the time they leave). This estimate is based on a steady-state approximation of the POD; that is, it assumes that the arrival rate (in patients/hour) remains constant. The arrival rate is determined by the number of people, the number of days and hours, and the number of PODs.

What about when the arrival rate is not constant? Some periods may have large arrival rates, others smaller. The cycle time will be larger when the arrival rate is larger. One approach to handle this is to change the model inputs to model each period and determine the cycle time for each period.

For example, suppose that one expects one period of time when patients will arrive to a POD at a rate of 100 per hour and another period of time when the arrival rate will be 500 per hour. For the first period, let the “Size of the population to be treated” equal 100, with 1 day for treatment, 1 hour of operation, and 1 clinic site. The outputs will provide the cycle time for this period. For the second period, change the “Size of the population to be treated” to be 500. The outputs will provide the cycle time for this period. If you plan to change the staffing for different periods, then change these as well.