MCast - Medical Logistics Optimization in Maritime Environments
Abstract
The scarcity and geographic dispersion of medical treatment facilities (MTFs) in the Pacific poses a threat to efficient evacuation of casualties and can compromise missionand medical objectives. The recent Disease Non-Battle Injury (DNBI) crisis onboard the USS Roosevelt perfectly capitulates the complexity of medical logistics planning in distributed operations. In this case, sailors infected with the COVID-19 virus exceeded the medical capabilities of the ship but could not be safely evacuated to onshore Role 2 facilities for a lack of capability to control the spread of infectious disease. The evacuation of the infected sailors would compromise the air and ground evacuation assets as well as the medical and operational personnel involved in the transport. Further, receiving facilities would subsequently be at risk of rampant COVID-19 infections that could affect other patients and staff. Navy leadership struggled with devising a medical and operational plan for docking and relaying the sailors onboard the USS Roosevelt.Similar to the above DNBI scenario, in a sufficiently complex mass casualty (MASCAS) event, planners will have difficulty determining how best to prioritize casualty care and transport.Without onsite MTFs, dispersed assets must be utilized. If a conflict necessitates that casualty hold times increase beyond minutes to hours or days, then re-supply at the point of injury will become increasingly important. Holding a casualty for days is such a challenging situation that aid in the form of autonomous re-supply and evacuation may be increasingly warranted.Optimizing existing assets can improve efficiency and increase return on medical and tactical assets. There is a need to develop a toolset that bridges the human users mental model of the operation with computational resources that streamline tedious, error-prone planning tasks.Executing an efficient MASCAS response is difficult because of the potential scale (volume, velocity, variety, and veracity) of the problem. A multi-layered optimization of medical and tactical decisions is needed for effective and safe casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) in the Pacific theater. Currently, there is no joint, real-time, single source of truth for visualizing injury detail and treatment requirements, transportation assets and sorties, and MTF capacity and capability to enable effective CASEVAC in challenging situations. The objective of this effort is to determine the capabilities provided in existing and future states of JMPT and CASCADE in order to inform the design and development of the Medical Logistics Optimization in Maritime Environment inorder to use the technology efficiently.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 11, 2020
- Source ID
- N000142012841
Entities
People
- Natalie Keeney
Organizations
- Applied Research Associates (United States)
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy