Improving Hospital Evacuation Planning using Simulation

Taaffe,; Johnson, _______; Steinmann, Philipp

doi:10.1109/wsc.2006.323123

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Taaffe et al propose a simulation model that includes stochastic uncertainty in evacuation task-duration and sequencing to estimate total evacuation time. 13 Tayfur and Taaffe enveloped a simulation model to evaluate how allocation of resources affects the efficiency and expediency of hospital evacuations. 14 Tayfur and Taaffe and Duanmu et al have developed simulation models that determine the impact that traffic and timing have on the time required to evacuate a hospital.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Evacuation of a Hospital without Electric Power

Vugrin

Verzi

Finley

et al. 2015

Prehosp. Disaster med.

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Hospital evacuations that occur during, or as a result of, infrastructure outages are complicated and demanding. Loss of infrastructure services can initiate a chain of events with corresponding management challenges. This report describes a modeling case study of the 2001 evacuation of the Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas (USA). The study uses a model designed to track such cascading events following loss of infrastructure services and to identify the staff, resources, and operational adaptations required to sustain patient care and/or conduct an evacuation. The model is based on the assumption that a hospital's primary mission is to provide necessary medical care to all of its patients, even when critical infrastructure services to the hospital and surrounding areas are disrupted. Model logic evaluates the hospital's ability to provide an adequate level of care for all of its patients throughout a period of disruption. If hospital resources are insufficient to provide such care, the model recommends an evacuation. Model features also provide information to support evacuation and resource allocation decisions for optimizing care over the entire population of patients. This report documents the application of the model to a scenario designed to resemble the 2001 evacuation of the Memorial Hermann Hospital, demonstrating the model's ability to recreate the timeline of an actual evacuation. The model is also applied to scenarios demonstrating how its output can inform evacuation planning activities and timing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Evacuation of a Hospital without Electric Power

Vugrin

Verzi

Finley

et al. 2015

Prehosp. Disaster med.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One of the issues of primary concern within a hospital facing an emergency is whether or not to evacuate patients, and if 'yes,' when to initiate that activity and how to ensure adequate resources for the evacuation. Taaffe et al discuss some general issues associated with hospital evacuation and describe a role for simulation in operational planning [25][26]. Childers and Taaffe provide an overview of literature on hospital evacuation, including lessons learned from case studies in specific situations [27].…”

Section: Previous Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Hospitals’ Adaptive Capacity during a Loss of Infrastructure Services

Vugrin

Verzi

Finley

et al. 2015

Journal of Healthcare Engineering

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Resilience in hospitals - their ability to withstand, adapt to, and rapidly recover from disruptive events - is vital to their role as part of national critical infrastructure. This paper presents a model to provide planning guidance to decision makers about how to make hospitals more resilient against possible disruption scenarios. This model represents a hospital's adaptive capacities that are leveraged to care for patients during loss of infrastructure services (power, water, etc.). The model is an optimization that reallocates and substitutes resources to keep patients in a high care state or allocates resources to allow evacuation if necessary. An illustrative example demonstrates how the model might be used in practice.

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“…The merging of such fields as, for example, early-warning disaster systems, crisis crowd sourcing, or digital infrastructure plans exist, though, there is no common understanding in terms of combining them into one ubiquitous platform yet. Therefore the goal of this architecture is to provide conditions for an efficient integration of data, similarly as it is to some extent achieved in the area of disaster response [14] [25].…”

Section: B Relation To Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computation of things for human protection and fulfillment

Zander

Mosterman

Kinnebrew

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST)

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I. VISION INTRODUCTIONLife has it that there is never enough preparation for a crisis, uncertainty about the appropriate actions to recover from a traumatic experience, and insufficient awareness of proper responses to bothering situations. Human beings and the problems that they encounter around the globe are so different from each other, in so many aspects, that research into appropriate sets of solutions is paramount.The convergence of recent technological advances and concepts, such as the cloud and high performance computing, information access/sharing, and Internet of Things enable the design of a Computation of Things (CoTh) framework with effective human-computer interaction for crisis situations. This paper illustrates how these advances could be employed and presents remaining challenges in its design and integration.An initial architectural design for CoTh is proposed, integrating (1) participatory sensing and remote sensing platforms, (2) a computational analysis engine, and (3) visually-spectacular interfaces that support making the decisions [30]. The overall architecture borrows from multiple, heterogeneous designs to provide an efficient, generic CoTh platform. It includes studies of selected existing components for data integration [3][10] [15] and the insights into the computation engine itself.CoTh is an approach to understanding the individual self and its surrounding based on the micro-scale information that combines with macro-scale data to enable prediction 1 of different life scenarios. It serves to deliver guidance towards sustainable development for an individual, but if projected and combined with behavioral patterns of groups, communities, and nations, it provides knowledge about the world-wide changes and their possible global effects. A more technical definition of CoTh is provided in the proceedings.The outlined vision of CoTh requires an analysis breaking the system down to its main objectives, requirements, and components. Section II provides selected individual-related scientific trends that constitute a basis for development of a more comprehensive definition for CoTh. This definition is then discussed in Section III. Here, the technological challenges are described and are then compared with the state of the art. In Section IV, the architecture proposal for CoTh is provided and the uniqueness of the computational paradigm shift is highlighted. Section V constitutes a preliminary achievability assessment of merging CoTh with the objectives of Digital-Earth vision. Also, risk factors and concept illustrations are briefly investigated. Conclusions complete the paper with a short summary and future plans. 1 According to [5] there is a distinction between a prediction and a forecast. Prediction attempts to accurately say what will happen before it happens. A forecast is an if/then contingency statement. Thus, a forecast does not describe what will happen, but rather what may happen given certain assumptions. By this definition, forecasting is the main driver of this research, altho...

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Improving Hospital Evacuation Planning using Simulation

Cited by 26 publications

References 14 publications

Modeling Evacuation of a Hospital without Electric Power

Modeling Evacuation of a Hospital without Electric Power

Modeling Hospitals’ Adaptive Capacity during a Loss of Infrastructure Services

Computation of things for human protection and fulfillment

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