"Effective Policies for Hospital Systems During an Earthquake Emergency Response"

Hospital systems face three critical issues during post-earthquake emergency responses: (1) damage to hospitals and supporting infrastructure disrupts critical hospital functions; (2) damage to the city’ built environment causes injuries that require medical treatment; and (3) hospitals that are disrupted, evacuated or overflowing have to make on-the-fly decisions to transfer patients, without proper coordination. As a result, a compromised hospital system can result in decreased “supply”, increased “demand”, and reduced coordination capacity. In this presentation, a framework that builds on recent Performance-based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) developments and targets to support post-earthquake decision making in hospital systems to meet emergency response demands will be shown. Our approach consisted in constructing a holistic formulation for hospital system resilience that integrates new models for (1) assessing the post-earthquake reduction of hospital system functionality, (2) quantifying multi-severity earthquake casualties, and (3) optimizing the hospital coordination strategy to effectively transfer patients and minimize waiting times within the hospital system. An illustration of the framework is included through an application to the city of Lima, Peru, subjected to a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.