February 26, 2021
Effective Policies for Hospital Systems during an Earthquake Emergency Response
Hospitals systems face three critical issues during post-earthquake emergency responses: (1) damage to hospitals and supporting infrastructure disrupts critical hospital functions; (2) damage to the city’ built environment causes injuries that require medical treatment; and (3) hospitals that are disrupted, evacuated or overflowing have to make on-the-fly decisions to transfer patients, without proper coordination. As a result, a compromised hospital system will decrease its “supply,” increase its “demand,” and reduce its coordination capacity. In this presentation, a framework that builds on recent Performance-based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) developments and targets to support post-earthquake decision making in hospital systems to meet emergency response demands will be shown. Our approach consisted of constructing a holistic formulation for hospital system resilience that integrates new models for (1) assessing the post-earthquake reduction of hospital system functionality, (2) quantifying multiseverity earthquake casualties, and (3) optimizing hospital coordination strategies to effectively transfer patients and minimize waiting times within the hospital system. A case study in Lima, Peru, subjected to a magnitude 8.0 earthquake, identifies the neighborhoods that will most likely be underserved by healthcare services during the emergency. The case study demonstrates that high-coordination emergency plans can reduce patient waiting times by a factor of three, potentially preventing additional loss of life.
Professor Ceferino joined the Civil and Urban Engineering Department and the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU in 2021. Previously, Prof. Ceferino was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. He completed his graduate studies in Structural Engineering at the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford University (M.S. in 2014 and Ph.D. in 2019) and his undergraduate studies in Civil Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, Peru (B.S. in 2011). He has consulting experience in seismic risk and structural engineering at Peruvian and U.S. engineering firms and at the World Bank. More recently, he developed a comprehensive platform for earthquake and tsunami risk visualization through the startup Yanapay in Peru.