Improving Mass Dispensing and Vaccination
Clinic Operations
Project Summary
The objective of this research project is to create mathematical and simulation models of mass dispensing and vaccination clinics (also known as points of dispensing or PODs) and to develop decision support tools to help emergency preparedness planners plan clinics that have enough capacity to serve residents quickly while avoiding unnecessary congestion. A poor clinic design will have insufficient capacity and long lines of patients waiting for vaccinations. More patients require more space as they wait to receive treatment. If too many patients are in the clinic, they cause congestion, crowding, and confusion.
Sponsor
The Montgomery County, Maryland, Advanced Practice Center for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response
Software
Visit our Software page for links to pages where you can download the software that we have created, including the Clinic Planning Model Generator, the Vaccine Allocation Model, and eMedCheck.
We have posted a new clinic planning model on the Clinic Planning Model Generator page. This model was created for a local school district that is planning to have flumist clinics.
Blog
We have started a blog called Public Health Preparedness Modeling to share information about this project (and other public health preparedness modeling efforts). We hope also to get comments and feedback from the public health community. Please take a look and let us know what we can do to make it more valuable to you!
Public Health Preparedness Models
We are constructing a list of computer models that have been developed for public health preparedness activities and are available on-line for use by public health professionals. This list will provide links to web sites for accessing the models. We would like to make this list as comprehensive as possible. To do so, we invite you to nominate models that you have used (or considered) and that you believe other local public health agencies would find useful. To do so, contact Jeffrey W. Herrmann at jwh2@umd.edu.
Publications
Our Publications page has links to papers that we have written about this project and the mathematical models we have developed.
Publicity
The Publicity page provides links to articles that have appeared discussing this research.
Project Team
Principal Investigator:
- Jeffrey W. Herrmann, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland.
The following students have contributed to the success of this project:
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More information:
www.isr.umd.edu/Labs/CIM/projects/clinic/
