Healthcare-facility crisis plans that can take months to develop could be produced in seconds with the right mathematical modeling — cutting out much of the painstaking human analysis, according to an article on the Boston Herald website.

Models allow healthcare facilities figure out complex situations with a lot of interacting factors. They can determine the most efficient way for hospitals to respond to incidents such as outbreaks of disease, natural disasters or tragedies.

“If you’re in a situation where many people need access to hospitals, there could be several issues — problems with transportation, congestion due to the number of people, access limitations for security reasons,” said Ozlem Ergun, an associate professor in Boston's Northeastern’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department. 

These methods have been used to help West Africa cope with the Ebola outbreak, and said the same approach could be used in U.S. cities to create a central point among its cluster of large hospitals to house supplies needed in crisis situations.

Read the article.