Innovations in Pandemic Planning

Building a decision engine for hundreds of facilities

How does a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of individualized facilities worldwide prepare themselves for a potential H1N1 outbreak within two months? This was the challenge that Aptus BCS approached Innovation Bound’s founder (Stavros Michailidis) with in 2009. Aptus’ client needed to create unique pandemic preparedness programs for its 300 plus facilities in a very limited time frame. Each facility needed a system capable of continuously assessing the site-specific risks and assigning trigger-based responses. Aptus’ client also needed to aggregate overall organizational pandemic readiness and exposure.

“While Aptus provided content expertise in the domains of business continuity and pandemic planning,” said Cynthia Simeone of Aptus BCS, “Stavros provided the innovation and creativity skills necessary to develop a novel and appropriate solution to a complex problem.”

The Innovation Challenge:

In under two months, they would need to develop a cost-effective, user-friendly tool to assess each local environmental position. It should incorporate current corporate standards and monitor compliance with those standards. All the while, the tool would need to function in locations where they could not count on a logistical and information infrastructure.  Stavros was invited to facilitate the gap analysis of existing and required solutions, develop processes and intrinsic logic for the new application and then commissioned to create and manage the development team.

The Result:

The Aptus Infectious Disease Model is a decision engine that addresses shortcomings of previous models and methodologies. It allows for diagnostics, planning, and decision making to occur at dispersed sites without requiring centralized control. The Infectious Disease Model is capable of dealing with hundreds of thousands of situations varying from disease attributes to facility needs, and it can prescribe appropriate procedures for each facility. More broadly, the application’s framework can be applied to other organizational threats as well.