Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare

News and Media Citations

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Firestorm: February 20, 2014. RealOpt - Helping Health Care Officials Make Important Decisions Quickly
Decision support capabilities for modeling and optimizing the public health infrastructure for all hazard emergency response: Exciting news on RealOpt© from AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Science - Annual Meeting 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? Read the full article

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Fox News: February 17, 2014. Hours to save the world: New software program aims to stop deadly pandemic spread
It's a terrifying doomsday scenario: A novel infectious disease is sweeping through the world's population, and health officials have only a day or two to stop its deadly spread. While this may sound like the plot of a movie thriller, health officials argue that an event of this kind could become a reality sometime in the near future. According to researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago, new drug-resistant infectious diseases are appearing more frequently -- and are spreading faster than ever before. Read the full article

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Medindia: February 15, 2014. AAAS Panel Gives Consideration to Pandemic Emergency Response
To help coordinate a rapid response to pandemics, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has designed software that combines biological data on the pandemic with demographic data of the at-risk population so that health officials can develop a game plan to limit the pandemic's spread. The software also combs social media sites for real-time information on the pandemic and activities of the population. Eva Lee, director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, will talk about her emergency response software at the 2014 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. Read the full article

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International Innovation May 2013. The Power of Technology: Transforming communication, education, business health and security through technological innovation. Optimising Decision Support, interviewed by Sophie Laggan Lee's NSF RAPID award "Population Protection and Monitoring in Response to Radiological Incidents" was selected as a featured article by the International Innovation. The optimisation of emergency responses is fundamental when time and resources are limited. Here, Professor Eva Lee explains how her career in mathematics has given her the tools and knowhow to develop decision support systems that respond rapidly in times of disaster. Emergency response capability and medical preparedness are necessary features of any community or nation. In a world with an ever expanding populous, the number of those affected by natural disasters, terrorist attacks, as well as biological or chemical incidents continues to rise. Easing pressure on resources, optimisation of response capability and preparedness are features of paramount importance. Recent times have seen favourable adoption of nuclear power as an alternative energy source. However, as past nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and, more recently, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan have shown, the consequences of nuclear disasters can be devastating. Indeed, limited human and material resources, as well as inevitable time limitations are significant challenges when responding to such an emergency. However, its emergency response planning is a highly complex task. In addition to the difficult shorterterm concerns of treating the injured, providing temporary shelters and distributing essential supplies, such events also necessitate the longterm assessment of the population's health, local radiation levels and tracking displaced citizens. More problematically, such disasters invariably involve large populations. It is for these reasons that a team from Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Professor Eva Lee, focuses its research efforts into developing a system for the optimisation of public health emergency and response infrastructure.
The project The group's focus over the past two years has been on the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear power plant suffered a series of failures which resulted in the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. The enormity and singularity of the emergency operations which took place have offered the team a prime opportunity for data collection and analysis. First-hand accounts and in-depth analysis in Fukushima's wake have provided a wealth of knowledge and real-life data pertaining to radiological emergency response. Read the full article

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HP INPUT/OUTPUT Feature Article: May 02, 2012. Curbing Catastrophes With Analytics Technology is being used more frequently to save lives, whether in surgery, to safeguard the elderly, or now, in the event of a disease outbreak during a catastrophe. Faced with the potential for mass casualties, emergency managers have to make critical decisions rapidly to assess the affected populations, determine the location and size of treatment distribution facilities, appropriately staff those facilities with adequately trained personnel, and provide them with needed medicines and supplies. Technology is being used more frequently to save lives, whether in surgery, to safeguard the elderly, or now, in the event of a disease outbreak during a catastrophe. Faced with the potential for mass casualties, emergency managers have to make critical decisions rapidly to assess the affected populations, determine the location and size of treatment distribution facilities, appropriately staff those facilities with adequately trained personnel, and provide them with needed medicines and supplies.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has partnered with a research team at Georgia Institute of Technology to produce a modeling tool to help health personnel with the challenge of mass dispensing of medical supplies in an emergency. The software, known as RealOpt (include our link), has decision support capabilities for modeling and optimizing the public health infrastructure for hazardous emergency response. It is designed for use in biological and radiological preparedness, for disease outbreaks planning and response, and for natural disasters planning. RealOpt helps officials plan for dispensing facilities locations, to ensure optimal facility staffing and allocation of resources, including routing of the population and dispensing modalities, according to Eva Lee, a professor at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Health Care at the school. Read the full article

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CTV news: March 11, 2012. Japan's Tsunami Anniversary, A Year Since Disaster Struck Dr. Lee, a professor in School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, spoke to CTV News Channel on Sunday, March 11 2012, the one-year anniversary of a powerful earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people.
Lee's work focuses on emergency response to all hazards, including biological, nuclear, radiological and chemical incidents. She has worked in this area for more than 9 years, and has spent much of that time focusing on mass casualty mitigation, which involves rapid deployment of medical supplies and medical services, and rapid distribution of food, clean water, etc to affected populations. Professor Eva Lee Professor Eva Lee developed RealOpt, the next generation informatics-analytic system to aid pandemic and biowarfare public health mass dispensing and emergency planning. The system includes a radiological response module that facilities radiological screening and decontamination operations. Particularly pertinent to Japan is her work related to radiological response and population screening and decontamination. Read the full article

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Science Newsline Technology: November 14, 2011. Systems Engineers Help Improve Flow of Visitors in Georgia Aquarium's New Dolphin Exhibit More than 1,800 visitors can move smoothly through the Georgia Aquarium's new AT&T Dolphin Tales exhibit, entering and leaving through the same set of doors. Their experience is not by accident though -- before the exhibit opened, logistics experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology carefully studied how guests would move and recommended ways to improve their experiences while minimizing congestion.

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Science Daily: July 11, 2011. Quick Test Can Predict Immune Responses to Flu Shots.

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Nature Immunology: June 6, 2011. Systems biology of vaccination for seasonal influenza in humans

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