A team of Johns Hopkins experts is offering a free
Web-based tool it developed to predict the
impact on individual hospitals of a flu epidemic,
bioterrorist attack, flood or plane crash, accounting
for such elements as numbers of victims, germ-carrying wind
patterns, available medical resources,
bacterial incubation periods and bomb size.
"Biological, chemical, radiological or explosive
attacks can bring hospitals and local health
agencies to their knees, quickly overwhelming their ability
to care for mass casualties," said Gabor
Kelen, head of
Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins and director of its
Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response,
known as CEPAR. "Our software lets users put their own
information into
the modeling software, customize it to their needs and
predict what they will need to handle a surge in
casualties."
Called EMCAPS, for Electronic Mass Casualty Assessment
& Planning Scenarios, the software
program is believed to be the first that generates the
anticipated outcomes of disaster-planning
scenarios developed by the Department of Homeland Security.
The scenarios include patient
estimates by injury type, estimated level of care required
and the need for decontamination facilities.
Developed by CEPAR and programmed by the Johns Hopkins
Applied Physics Laboratory,
EMCAPS is reported on in detail in the February edition of
Annals of Emergency Medicine. The
program can be downloaded from the CEPAR Web site,
www.hopkins-cepar.org.
James J. Scheulen, lead investigator for the EMCAPS
project, said, "Comprehensive disaster
preparedness planning requires the ability to expand care
capabilities in response to sudden or
prolonged demand." Scheulen is executive director of CEPAR
and chief administrative officer of the
Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine.
Meridith Thanner, a CEPAR research associate and
program manager with the National Center
for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event
Response, said, "While the planning scenarios
developed by the Department of Homeland Security form a
good basis for constructing disaster
exercises, EMCAPS adds value by giving hospitals a platform
for providing a needed level of detail and
accounting for local conditions that influence health care
demand and response in their regions."
When designing EMCAPS, its developers selected eight
of 15 Homeland Security scenarios that
could result in large-scale health effects: anthrax
inhalation; plague; food contamination; blister,
nerve and toxic agents; dirty bombs; and improvised
explosive device attacks. The remaining scenarios,
including natural disasters and cyber attacks, were
excluded because of either insufficient
information for computer modeling or low casualty
probability as a result of an attack.
CEPAR serves as Johns Hopkins' command center for
institutionswide planning for and reaction
to a disaster. The agency combines the skills of Johns
Hopkins Medicine faculty and staff with the
tactical planning capabilities of the Applied Physics
Laboratory staff, the public health investigative
skills of the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the
faculty and facilities of the
university's Homewood campus.
In 2005, CEPAR spearheaded the creation of the
national Center for the Study of
Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response, known as
PACER, to coordinate U.S. technological,
medical and physical resources to ensure effective response
to any disaster.