An integrated socio-technical approach for post-earthquake recovery of interdependent healthcare system

The premise of community resilience hinges on preventing extreme events from becoming disasters through minimizing initial disruptions and ensuring quick recovery of the various community sectors. Recovery of critical facilities and public assemblies, such as the healthcare systems, is particularly important since they are vital for short-term and long-term functioning of communities. This article outlines a new framework for estimating full functionality and recovery of healthcare systems in a community following earthquake occurrence. The presented framework includes estimation of both quantity and quality components of the offered healthcare service overtime and quantification of patient demand on each healthcare facility while accounting for their interdependence as well as their interaction with other community infrastructure. When estimating the recovery of healthcare services, stochastic modeling and dynamic optimization are utilized to account for limited repair resources, repair sequences, and change in demand over time. The presented approach is applied to Centerville, a virtual testbed community, to highlight the capabilities of the proposed framework and the impact of decisions made on the recovery trajectory. It is observed that high level of interaction between the healthcare system components is essential to reduce patient demands on hospitals. It is also shown that proper allocation and distribution of repair resources are key to achieving the desired level of functionality for the hospitals.