A colleague in Montgomery County forwarded to me an email from AHRQ about the Mass Evacuation Transportation Planning Model. According to the AHRQ web site, “This model estimates the time required to evacuate patients in healthcare facilities and transport them to receiving facilities.” The model was developed by Tom Rich and Myfanwy Callahan under funding from DHS and HHS.
The web-based tool has a nice interface that allows one to create a new scenario, open a saved scenario, evaluate a scenario, and get help. The help consists of a user’s manual and a report about the model’s details. Building a model requires specifying the number of vehicles available for transport, selecting a metropolitan area (from the list given), the number of facilities sending patients (along with how many patients), and the number of facilities accepting patients. The model includes four types of patients based on the type of transportation needed. The model determines the time to move patients between facilities based on average times between hospitals in representative cities. Thus, the user does not need to enter actual facility locations. The user can save the scenario as a XML file that is downloaded onto the user’s computer and can upload the saved scenario as well.
The model estimates the total evacuation time, defined as “the total time from the beginning of the evacuation until the last evacuee is on a vehicle for transport to a receiving facility.” It also determines for each type of patient the evacuation time and the number of round trips of that type of vehicle.
