The Impact of Hospital Mutual Aid Agreements on Emergency Stockpiling
Purdue University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Introduction
Recent catastrophic disasters, such as the September 11th terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, along with the growing threat of a world-wide pandemic influenza (flu) outbreak have placed disaster preparedness planning as one of the top priority tasks for federal, state and local governments, as well as for individual healthcare service providers. However, it is not sufficient for individual healthcare service providers to have their response plans in place without adequately integrating into the overall community emergency planning. Previous research work with the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) and St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital has revealed that the current lack of collaboration among hospitals and public health agencies hinders effective emergency preparedness planning and it is a critical problem that needs immediate actions.
Among various fronts in integrating emergency preparedness planning efforts, some hospitals have generally come to a consensus that sharing physical and workforce resources would be mutually beneficial for all participants. Mechanisms such as a mutual aid agreement can be signed by a group of hospitals in a region, for example. Such an agreement or a memorandum of understanding (MOU) states each hospital’s willingness to loan medical supplies and/or personnel by the request of other participating hospitals in case of a medical emergency. We see this as a great means to temporarily mitigate the potentially server impact of surges of patients, thus large needs of medical supplies and personnel, on healthcare systems in case of a disaster, such as a pandemic influenza.
Problem Definition
In the face of the growing threat of the next pandemic flu, hospitals across the country are now putting in place their pandemic flu preparedness and response plans. One aspect of planning is the stockpiling of certain critical medical supplies needed for large numbers of infected individuals. Since large numbers may overwhelm individual healthcare facilities once a pandemic flu breaks out, such stockpiling serves as a short-term safety net in order to fulfill demand from surge patients and during any delay in shipment of medical supplies. Our proposed research targets this stockpiling issue in individual hospitals, taking into account their willingness to share resources during an emergency. Therefore, inventory models will be applied to examine the costs and benefits of stockpiling certain types of medical supplies.
The research will analytically test the hypothesis that aggregating hospital inventories through a mutual aid agreement or a MOU mechanism in a pandemic flu scenario can lower the probability of short-term stock-out among the participating facilities. Furthermore, the research will focus on finding the optimal stockpile levels of a single item in individual hospitals with minimum or minimum acceptable shortage. As an extension, the problem will investigate stockpiling of multiple items in consideration of their shelf lives and design the stockpiling or stock rotating policies accordingly.
