This symposium is an initial effort to achieve the following objectives:

1. Encourage development of guidelines and standards for modeling and simulation in the Emergency Management and Emergency Healthcare Systems environment
2. Identify minimum data requirements for modeling efforts
3. Define needed standard interfaces for the Emergency Management (Community based) and Emergency Health care delivery systems (facility based)
4. Establish consensus based criteria for live and computer based simulation exercises as well as the outcome measures for community and facility scenarios
5. Define requirements toward accreditation/certification for Healthcare modeling/simulation professionals
    

At the end of the symposium/workshop attendees will gain understanding of issues and steps involved in M&S application to emergency management and health care systems including:

1. Evaluate current practices
     a. What other models does your facility currently own?
     b. What applications were used to create the models and are they compatible?
     c. Where is the database which supports both the hospital models as well as the emergency management planning models?
     d. Can your current ‘paper’ plans be converted to models?
2. Plan the project with solutions to the following questions:
     a. Can your current models ‘talk to each other’?
     b. How can we help you better your existing models?
     c. Does your emergency planning model cover both tactical and strategic planning?
     d. Does your Emergency planning model incorporate public health data (disease-based models) and human behavior networks, and can the model interface with an ED process model?
3. Determine relationship of physical space architecture to modeling projects.
4. Improve the capabilities of the emergency community and healthcare systems through modeling and simulation.
5. Describe an integrated toolset that can be upgraded and linked to other operational systems.