Public Health Preparedness Modeling

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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