Bioterrorism Planning Tool for Hospitals

A "roadmap” has been developed that is designed to aid the crisis decision-making in the event of a bioterrorism attack and allow health officials to preplan such details as deployment of resources and the triage of victims.

The capacity of hospitals to take and treat victims may be limited and immediate decisions about quarantine and deployment of resources would be necessary in case of a bioterrorism attack. Victims would have to be triaged so those with the highest survival would be treated first. The most important variables in managing such a crisis are the size of the event relative to the available medical capacity, the timeline of effective response, and the characteristics of the pathogen used. Called the Pittsburgh Matrix, the new emergency response planning tool is intended to offer a method for quantifying survivorship, medical costs for response, and options for treatment of specific bioterrorism agents.

The Pittsburgh Matrix works by identifying various bioterrorism scenarios and assessing them against hospital patient volume and timeline of the detection. Four levels of hospital patient volume are measured, ranging from low, medium, high, and above-all capacity. The values given to the timeline of detection include the pre-release stage, the release stage, the symptom occurrence stage, the illness occurrence stage, and the epidemic stage. The project is designed to fit each particular hospital facility, whether large or small. It might suggest to one hospital to stockpile medications rather than invest in hospital surveillance detection systems, but offer different recommendations to another.

"Terrorism inevitably leads to hospital intervention,” says lead researcher Michael P. Allswede, D.O., assistant professor of emergency medicine and section chief, special emergency medical response, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (PA, USA). "Through the development of the Pittsburgh Matrix, we have taken the guesswork out of planning for a terrorist attack so physicians can make rapid informed decisions during a crisis.”




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