Montgomery County's Public Health Service Uses Operations Research to Plan Emergency Mass Dispensing and Vaccination Clinics

To curb outbreaks of contagious diseases, county health departments must set up and operate clinics to dispense medications and vaccines. Carefully planning these clinics in advance of such an event is difficult and important. We developed and implemented operations research models to improve clinic planning for the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Health Services. They include discrete-event simulation models and capacity-planning and queueing-system models. We validated these models using data that we collected during full-scale simulations of disease outbreaks. We also developed guidelines for the physical design of clinics based on general queueing principles and our own experiences.