Public Health Preparedness Modeling

The “island” in the title is the Public Health Preparedness island that is part of the virtual world Second Life. The island is developed by the Center for the Advancement of Distance Education (CADE) at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Our collaborators at the [...]

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The latest addition to our list of public health preparedness models is a mass casualty assessment model called EMCAPS, created by researchers at the PACER center at Johns Hopkins University. According to the developers, “it is intended to allow users to model disaster scenarios for drill planning and to use as an education resource. [...]

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A user in New York asked for clarification of some of the inputs to the Clinic Planning Model Generator. Here is my response for everyone’s use.
Patient arrival batch size: Do the patients arrive in batches (because of transportation like buses)? If not, then just enter 1.
Batch size variance:What is the variance of these [...]

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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) [...]

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A planner from California wrote about some problems using the Clinic Planning Model Generator with Excel 97. We investigated and found that the software used a function that was not available in Excel 97. We created a specialized version with a substitute function that performs the same calculation but is compatible with Excel [...]

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After one of my talks in Seattle, a colleague suggested that we should consider open source software instead of relying on Microsoft Excel for the Clinic Planning Model Generator. His comment was motivated by Massachusetts’ intention to use open source software. I have not heard of any other states moving in that [...]

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