Public Health Preparedness Modeling

A mass casualty event places a huge burden on local hospitals. How much of a burden? The AHRQ Hospital Surge Model provides hospitals and public health officials with a way to predict the hospital resources required.
The model is a web-based tool that requires answering two questions: (1) what type of [...]

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This summer I had the great fortune to work with two undergraduate industrial engineering students (one from Virginia Tech, the other from the University of San Diego) on the medication distribution problem. (The students were participating in an REU site here at Institute for Systems Research.)
This is the problem of planning how to distribute [...]

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Rachel Abbey (Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Health Services) sent me a link to an article at Government Health IT about computer tools developed at the University of Minnesota’s National Center for Food Protection and Defense.
The Consequence Management System will be used to predict and track food contamination and relies upon data from [...]

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The folks at the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon have been developing BioWar, which is designed to help policymakers evaluate different alternatives for responding to a smallpox attack. BioWar combines

state-of-the-art computational models of social networks, communication media, disease models, demographically accurate agent models, wind dispersion models, [...]

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