When a pandemic spreads, health officials must quickly formulate a strategy to limit infections and deaths. This requires sifting through huge amounts of data in a short amount of time and organize medical staff who may have little information on the pandemic.
If you would like to help coordinate a rapid reaction to pandemics, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta designed software that biological data on the pandemic with demographics of the endangered population combines so that health officials can develop a game plan to limit the pandemic expansion. The software also combing social media sites for real-time information about the pandemic and the activities of the population.
Eva Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in medicine and health care on the h. Milton Stewart School of industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, talked about her emergency response software on the 2014 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.
"We have developed a real-time system that the demographics of the area that is affected, and also pick up on-the-ground data about who's available and does what, and will gather on the movement of the affected population," Lee said. "Our work is the first to include demographic information and real-time population behavior and interlace with the biological information to come up with a decision that health officials can actually use."
Lee was the Chairman of the panel entitled "Emergency Response and community resilience through Engineering and computational advances."
Lee shareed its experience in helping federal officials respond to the H1N1 flu in 2009, as well as her experience plans an emergency response to a possible outbreak of anthrax. Lee was also involved in the coordination of a response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the decontamination and health screening effort in Japan after the 2011 Fukushima radiological disaster.
Other speakers on the Panel are Ronald Eguchi ImageCat's Inc. in Long Beach, Calif., who talked about inventory data capture tools to assess risk of natural disasters. Yasuaki Sakamoto, of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, spoke about improving social media for disaster relief.
Emergency responders should a pandemic quickly collect information on the biological agent to assess the characteristics of the pandemic and decide what treatment would be most effective. They also collect information about the risk factors of the individuals in the pandemic, such as the severity of the disease of the patient, and if children or pregnant women are infected.
"The big challenge in a pandemic is how do you use all this information to determine the best strategy gets you the minimum number of total infections and death rate," Lee said.
Information of Lee's official health systems approach to determine where to allocate medical resources and staff in the best way so that most operations will be successful. By the software developed in her lab at Georgia Tech, officials may provide, such as how much vaccine to give at-risk populations and how much to give to the general population to limit the spread of the infection and mortality. Officials can also where medical sites to prevent traffic crashes and deterioration of the pandemic as infected patients on treatment sites converge.
"We can do a real time optimization to tell you exactly what the sites you need to set up and which should go where," said Lee.
"Emergency Response and community resilience through Engineering and computational advances" 14 February 2014 2014 on the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.
Georgia Institute of Technology
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