MODELING & SIMULATION

BACKGROUND

Providing life-saving care in theater and maintaining the health and readiness of our warfighters across a range of operations require the right equipment, supplies, and personnel be available to deliver that care whenever and wherever it is needed.
Military medical planners and logisticians have lacked a science-based standardized methodology for predicting the likelihood of injuries and illnesses, estimating casualties and patient streams, and estimating the requirements for in-theater hospitals to care for those patients. This gap undermines effective planning for operational medical support. We developed the Joint Medical Planning Tool (JMPT) and the Medical Planner’s Toolkit (MPTk) to fill this gap.

VALUE

Our Modeling and Simulation team create tools to equip military medical planners, providers, trainers, and logisticians with the capability to examine various courses of action before, during, and after deployment. The tools can be used to more effectively allocate resources, assess risks, estimate casualties, and determine mission readiness.

GOALS

Equip military leaders and medical planners with the scientifically based, validated tools to plan medical contingencies across a diverse range of operational scenarios.
Enable military and medical planners to more efficiently manage resources in theater.

METHODS

JMPT is a computer-based simulation tool that models patient flow from the point of injury through more definitive care. It supports research, medical systems analysis, operational risk assessment, and field medical services planning. JMPT is based on empirical data, including over 400 patient conditions and their associated medical treatment tasks, times, and equipment necessary to accomplish patient care. JMPT spans the spectrum of theater-based levels of care and emulates military treatment facilities, including the number and type of personnel, and the type, speed, and capacity of transportation assets. The MPTk consists of the Patient Condition Occurrence Frequency (PCOF) tool, the Casualty Rate Estimation Tool (CREstT), the Expeditionary Medicine Requirements Estimator (EMRE), and the Estimating Supplies Program (ESP). This suite of tools provides an end-to-end solution for medical support planning across the range of military operations.
The PCOF tool provides baseline probability distributions for illnesses and injuries across a range of 33 military operations. The tool allows the user to adjust these baselines to better fit planned operations.
CREstT provides the capability to emulate the operational plan, by using a 365 -day palette to calculate battle and non-battle injuries and illnesses that are expected during ground military operations. Casualty estimates can also be generated for ship attacks, fixed facilities, and natural disasters. This functionality is integrated with the PCOF tool, which provides the PCOF distributions used to develop patient streams.
EMRE estimates operating room, intensive care unit, ward/bed, evacuation, and blood product requirements for in-theater hospitalization, based on a given patient load. EMRE provides estimates based on an average daily patient count specified by the user or patient streams calculated by CREstT. EMRE is fully integrated with both the PCOF tool and CREstT.
ESP uses scenario-specific patient streams created by CREstT and known medical supply inventories to estimate the total supply requirement for treating those patients.

KEY FINDINGS

Both JMPT and MPTk have been formally validated, verified, and fully accredited for the Department of Defense.

Bureau of Medicine and Surgery
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General Navy Medical Inquiries (to Bureau of Medicine and Surgery): usn.ncr.bumedfchva.list.bumed---pao@health.mil