Public Health Preparedness Modeling

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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The article by Brandeau et al. in the same issue presents recommendations for mathematical and simulation models:
1. Include stakeholder input to effectively address the spectrum of relevant real-world planning and response problems.
2. Include a user-friendly interface, the ability to customize model inputs to suit local needs, the ability to quickly and easily perform sensitivity analysis, [...]

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The July/August 2009 issue of Medical Decision Making includes an article by Nathaniel Hupert and his colleagues describing a model that determines the expected number of individuals who develop symptomatic inhalational anthrax and require hospital-based intravenous antibiotic treatment. The key parameters in their study are delays in the dispensing of antibiotics and the effectiveness [...]

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The Montgomery County, MD, Advanced Practice Center for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response and I would like to remind everyone that POD planning tools like the Clinic Planning Model Generator (CPMG) can be used to plan staffing and predict queueing and throughput H1N1 vaccination in PODs and in schools.
Some of these will be very [...]

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The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has developed new new recommendations for vaccine allocation.
The target groups and priorities are different from those in the previously released Guidance on Allocating and Targeting Pandemic Influenza Vaccine.
Although the current version can be modified to take these into account, we will be releasing a new version of our [...]

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As part of our collaboration with the Montgomery County, Maryland, Advanced Practice Center for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response, we have developed a Vaccine Allocation Model.
The Vaccine Allocation Model is intended to help public health officials determine how many persons in different target groups can receive treatment if the number of vaccinations available is [...]

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NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness & Response has been developing an agent-based disaster simulation model.
The tool is called Planning with Large Agent-Networks against Catastrophes (PLAN C). According to its web site, PLAN C is designed to help “emergency managers, urban planners and public health officials to prepare and evaluate Pareto-optimal plans to respond to [...]

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The University of Maryland and the Montgomery County, Maryland, Advanced Practice Center for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response are pleased to announce the release of a new version of eMedCheck.
This PDA-based software is designed for screening individuals at a hepatitis A vaccination clinic. The software asks questions about the patient’s medical history [...]

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The CDC has a set of resources for planning vaccination clinics. These come from a message from CDC’s Division of State and Local Readiness.
U.S. 2009 H1N1 Vaccine Strategy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A graphical depiction of the predicted waves of the outbreak and the expected time frames for vaccine development, [...]

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The journal IIE Transactions now has a homeland security department. This department intends to publish descriptions of research efforts that develop and test innovative operations research models and methodologies that can help organizations design better homeland security systems, including those for planning, prevention, response, and recovery.
For more information, please see the department web site.

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