Associate Professor Hussam Mahmoud and Ph.D. Candidate Emad Hassan have created a modeling tool that could help city planners and emergency managers understand the full functionality and recovery of a healthcare system, in the wake of a natural disaster. They have developed innovative methods for measuring the recovery of hospitals and schools that will be used by community planners and decision-makers to understand the resilience of their communities. Now the health care system model they have developed has a new application. Hassan and Mahmoud, are exploring the use of the model to investigate the impact of the pandemic on U.S. health care systems. Coupling the model with COVID-19 data, they can learn how patients are distributed in different health care facilities, the capacity of each facility to treat patients, the impact of triage criteria, patient treatment time, patient waiting time, and patient outcome based on the availability of disinfection supplies. They feel the model can be used to study the effect of community-level decisions. Read More