| Megan McRainey
Institute Communications and Public Affairs
Your city has 48 hours to vaccinate every man, woman
and child to prevent a dangerous pandemic. Where do
you put the clinics, how many health care workers will
you need and how do you get two million people to a
finite number of emergency clinics?
The logistics of handling all those panicked people,
health care workers, vaccinations, clinics and forms
are dizzying. And while health departments have plans
in place, it’s very difficult to know how well
those plans will perform when time is critical and the
minutes needed to move patients to a large clinic or
for a frightened patient to fill out a form could mean
life or death for thousands of people.
Now researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a computer
program, based on a clinical model created by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to help
state, city and county health care departments create
and test more efficient plans for treating infectious
illness, whether it’s natural or man-made.
The program, called RealOpt and created by Eva Lee,
a professor of
industrial and systems engineering, will be installed
over the next few months at health departments across
the state of Georgia. While the program is still in
the testing phase, it will soon be available free to
any government health department that requests it.
RealOpt has been tested by the DeKalb County Health
Department in Georgia, and the county ran a very successful
anthrax drill last year. Lee used RealOpt to help DeKalb
test and improve its existing bioterror preparedness
plan. Health departments in 35 other states also have
plans to test the program.
The program 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 being able to assess preparedness,
health departments will have a more precise estimate
of the resources and funds needed to treat communities
before an actual outbreak.
In addition to its role in planning, one of RealOpt’s
significant advantages is its ability to process data
in real time as the emergency treatment occurs. As patient
flows fluctuate, the program can determine how to reallocate
the facility’s resources in a fraction of a second,
sending more doctors or nurses to one station or more
attendants to the paperwork processing area.
“Rapid analysis of scenarios not only allows
for large-scale planning and preparedness, but also
allows on-the-spot optimization to maintain the best
resource allocation over time,” Lee said. “As
patients enter and progress through the clinic we can
observe the flow and dynamically adjust the configuration
as needed. This is also critical for response to catastrophic
events, for example, if one treatment site collapses.”
RealOpt also includes an automated facility-layout
drawing tool that allows health care workers to design
and analyze their own clinic layout in response to various
emergency situations, such as anthrax, smallpox, flu
pandemic or natural disaster.
Lee continues to add to RealOpt’s capabilities,
and is currently adding a disease propagation component
to the system. The addition would help to analyze the
disease’s spread within treatment sites and possible
ways to halt or minimize the spread. It will also determine
how to redirect patients should one center need to be
quarantined or closed to prevent further spread of a
disease.
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