News Story

Managing public health crises through a virtual world

Posted 08/21/2009

If you were a city health commissioner, how would you manage an infectious disease outbreak that resulted in mass fatalities? Would you close schools? Quarantine neighborhoods? Suspend public transit?

A new training simulation program enables public health practitioners to get hands-on experience in a virtual world similar to Second Life. In addition, the simulation allows training from a distance, which can eliminate time-consuming, expensive travel for understaffed and underfunded health departments.

The virtual world program is being developed by John "Mac" Crawford, assistant professor in the college's Division of Environmental Health Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues in the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. The college's Center for Public Health Practice, which provides training and professional development for public health practitioners, is also involved.

virtual world
John "Mac" Crawford, assistant professor, with the virtual world he helped create as a training tool for public health practitioners.

Now that the program has been developed, Crawford and the team will compare the virtual world training to traditional PowerPoint-based exercises.

"What we're trying to accomplish with this project is to create a system that allows effective, public health training and exercise simulations to be conducted without participants needing to travel for the experience. We hope that the world we are creating will engage participants more fully than a standard PowerPoint table-top exercise might," Crawford said.

Another possible outcome of successfully developing this system is that, in the event of a real infectious disease outbreak, there may be advantages to public health officials meeting online in a virtual world to plan and implement responses.

After pilot testing with students and staff, he hopes to recruit up to 70 practitioners, half randomly assigned to the virtual world and half assigned to the standard table-top exercise.

"We hope to find that, first of all, the ‘virtual' system does allow participants to fully engage in a small part of the planning process involved in responding to a novel infectious disease outbreak.

"A secondary, positive outcome of the research would be that practitioners using the virtual simulation system would have greater satisfaction with the training and would retain accurate information about the planning process to a greater degree than those getting the standard table-top," Crawford said.

The pilot testing began in August, and the team would like to begin testing practitioners in the fall. Depending on how difficult it is to recruit public health personnel, given the H1N1 influenza pandemic, testing could continue through the autumn and extend into 2010. Crawford hopes to present the results in the late winter or early spring of 2010.

The project is funded by Ohio State's Public Health Preparedness for Infectious Diseases (PHPID) research initiative. More than 125 faculty members across six colleges at Ohio State focus on emerging infectious disease threats and how to better respond. The primary areas of activity for PHPID include translating scientific discoveries into real-world applications, detecting emerging infectious diseases, preventing human infection from animals, addressing food safety issues, and training professionals to lead the next generation.

 

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The Ohio State University's College Public Health is an integral part of the most comprehensive health sciences campus in the nation. The college was created in February 2007 by the University Board of Trustees. First established in 1995 as part of the College of Medicine, we are the first and only accredited school of public health in the state of Ohio. Specializations within the college include biostatistics, epidemiology, health behavior and health promotion, environmental health sciences, health services management and policy, veterinary public health and clinical investigations. The college is currently ranked 21st in public health graduate schools by US News & World Report. Its Master of Health Administration program is ranked 12th.