by Carrie Barnett

Bioterrorist attack or massive disease outbreak is a nightmare scenario for public health officials. If it becomes reality, they must make decisions about how to allocate finite medical resources…quickly. Their decisions will mean lives lost or saved.

Ajay Vinze and Raghu Santanam are information systems professors at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. They considered the best ways to manage critical resources in such scenarios. The ASU researchers realized that, from a business perspective, the public health system is a very large and complex supply chain—in many ways even more intricate than that of an enterprise like Wal-Mart.

In 2003, Vinze and colleagues began to study how state and local public health organizations could better prepare for biological terrorism. The work was funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Santanam and Vinze created a computer model that allows officials to simulate public health crises. The stakes were much higher in the ASU researchers' life-or-death calculations, but the model was similar to the planning that businesses do to ensure proper levels of inventory.

"Our simulation allows policy makers to experiment. 'Is that the best way of doing this? What is the implication of this? Are there other regional cooperation policies that work better?'" Vinze explains.

The ASU simulations showed results that are not necessarily intuitive.
For example, the CDC plans to stockpile antiviral medication in a central location to deal with bioterrorism or epidemics. Results indicated the central stockpile is not as efficient in saving lives as dispersing resources before they are needed. Vinze and Santanam found that localities could respond faster by pooling among themselves.