Imagine that a terrorist has just released the smallpox virus in Atlanta, and suddenly there’s a race against time to vaccinate and treat every last man, woman and child in metro Atlanta before the deadly virus can spread.
In a bioterror scenario such as this, the speed at which emergency health care facilities treat patients can mean the difference between life and death for thousands (or even millions) of people. And the logistics of such a large-scale emergency plan are dizzyingly complex.
But Eva Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has created a computer program that is up to the task.
Based on a software model created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lee developed the program, called RealOpt©, to help U.S. state, city and county healthcare departments organize the most efficient plan for treating infectious illness, whether it’s a natural or man-made outbreak.
While government health departments have emergency plans in place, it is difficult to test a plan’s efficiency against the urgency and sheer number of patients an outbreak would create. And when a severe outbreak of influenza starts to spread through the population, treatment facilities are faced with a number of problems as they attempt to treat or vaccinate many thousands of patients in just a few days.
How many doctors will be needed? How many nurses? How long will it take frightened or unprepared patients to fill out paperwork? How will infected patients be separated from healthy patients?
The CDC, recognizing that local public health departments needed guidance on what human resources would be required to treat the affected population, created a model that could assist in this effort. Then Lee, who is also an associate professor at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, and her Georgia Tech team used the CDC model as a guide to build a new, more powerful program.
RealOpt can be used to prepare for a possible outbreak, as well as for emergency re-assignment of health care workers within the clinic and between clinics during an actual outbreak. By determining their preparedness, health departments will have a thorough estimate of what resources and funds they will need to treat their communities before an actual outbreak occurs.