Program to Halt Pandemics Installed in Georgia

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Program to Halt Pandemics Installed in Georgia

The program has been used in DeKalb County and will be installed

throughout Georgia. The program is also slated to be used in 35

other states.

http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=941

ATLANTA (April 20, 2006) — 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 2 million people to a finite number of emergency clinics?

RealOpt has several functions for helping health departments

organize and test pandemic plans.

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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 or millions 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 U.S. state, city and county health

care departments create and test more efficient plans for treating

infectious illness, whether it's a natural or man-made outbreak.

The program, called RealOpt and created by Dr. Eva Lee, an associate

professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia

Institute of Technology, will be installed over the next few months

at health departments across the state of Georgia and health

departments in 35 other states have plans to test the program. While

the program is still in the testing phase, it will soon be available

free to any government health department that requests it from

Georgia Tech.

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.

RealOpt takes the numerous variables associated with a health care

department's treatment of a very large group of people, and through

large-scale simulation and optimization (even considering variables

such as panic and language barriers), pinpoints the most efficient

way to move patients to and through a facility. Using the program, a

health care department can determine the best location for emergency

clinics based on population density and road accessibility, the most

efficient facility layout, the number of health care professionals

needed in certain areas, the number of vaccinations needed and the

time it will take to treat patients.

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 being able to

assess preparedness, health departments will have more a 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.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere

research universities. Ranked ninth among U.S. News & World Report's

top public universities, Georgia Tech educates more than 17,000

students every year through its Colleges of Architecture, Computing,

Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech maintains a

diverse campus and is among the nation's top producers of women and

African-American engineers. The Institute offers research

opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is

home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech

Research Institute. During the 2004-2005 academic year, Georgia Tech

reached $357 million in new research award funding. The Institute

also maintains an international presence with campuses in France and

Singapore and partnerships throughout the world.