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Helping companies prepare for pandemics and other disasters
The Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) tool is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models can aid in understanding and helping prevent or inhibit the spread of such diseases.
Policymakers responsible for strategies to contain disease and prevent epidemics need an accurate understanding of disease dynamics and the likely outcomes of preventive actions. In an increasingly connected world with extremely efficient global transportation links, the vectors of infection can be quite complex. STEM facilitates the development of advanced mathematical models, the creation of flexible models involving multiple populations (species) and interactions between diseases, and a better understanding of epidemiology.
The Public Health Information Affinity Domain solution (PHIAD) is a scalable, standards-based, hierarchical network for the exchange of public health information. PHIAD uses clinical interoperability specifications from Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). By using the same technical infrastructure and laboratory-specific standards being created and actively adopted worldwide, public health organizations can centralize laboratory data.
IBM also has developed a service, the Contingency Planning Assessment (CPA), designed to help clients understand their potential exposure to a pandemic outbreak, and implement strategies to safeguard employees and maintain operations once an outbreak occurs.
CPA provides an assessment of an organization’s pandemic preparedness in a variety of areas: pandemic communication and education plans for employees and customers; human resource planning and monitoring; employee impact and mitigation plans; proximity to healthcare facilities; supply chain impact and mitigation plans; government interface plans; linkages to crisis and business continuity plans; business function and location-specific impact; IT, network, security and workplace infrastructure continuity; and resource identification and tracking.
The service bases its review on industry best practices and guidelines established by the U.S. government, World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as IBM’s decades of experience in managing actual disaster situations.
By modeling potential links between the dynamics of disease and business, IBM’s Pandemic Business Impact Modeler (PBIM) helps users simulate the potential impacts of a pandemic outbreak on business performance. It also aids in pandemic preparedness by allowing companies to run various simulations, which in turn may help them to develop and test current and future crisis management plans.
While specifically focused on understanding the impact of a pandemic—especially the human factors—CPA considers overall disaster preparedness. The plans and procedures will be applicable for many events that threaten workers, including hurricanes, power outages and earthquakes, for example.