Disseminating emergency preparedness planning models as automatically generated custom spreadsheets

When public health officials requested OR models to help county health departments across the United States create plans for dispensing medications and vaccines during emergencies, we developed capacity planning and queueing network models. We then faced the challenge of distributing these models to people with minimal experience with OR techniques and no resources for acquiring and learning new software. To eliminate the most significant obstacles, we decided to use spreadsheets. We created a spreadsheet application that runs Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros to generate customized analytical models without the assistance of an OR professional; thus, users could evaluate a wide variety of plans. Developing spreadsheets for this type of application differs significantly from end–user modeling and typical spreadsheet applications. The software is available on our website for public health emergency preparedness planners to download.