Simulating Dynamic Mortality within the Military Medical Chain of Evacuation and Treatment

摘要

Medical casualty flow models associated with battlefield scenarios do not typically use survival functions to simulate mortality as casualties with life-threatening injuries progress through the various stages of evacuation and treatment from the point of injury. We demonstrate using successive stage modeling concepts from reliability engineering and the biomedical sciences how the Weibull distribution can be used to dynamically simulate mortality versus elapsed time at progressive medical treatment facilities in a combat environment. Parameters for this initial model come from opinion results gathered from a subject matter expert panel of 10 military medical doctors convened by the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC). Empirical data are being collected from Operation Iraqi Freedom to test the initial results in a more inferential model building approach. We include brief results from a recent Marine Corps study to illustrate the utility of being able to apply dynamic mortality estimates to battlefield medical configurations involving logistical queueing and various time-distance relationships. The results were generated using NHRC's Tactical Medical Logistics (TML) planning tool.