Analyzing Resilience of Healthcare Systems with COVID-19 Case Study

The recent COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges in many aspects of societal welfare, especially in healthcare systems. While resilience is a core concept in disaster risk reduction in other engineering and systems disciplines, its application to healthcare systems is relatively recent. In healthcare systems, resilience has been sparsely explored without widely adopted metrics in place. Although there are some suggested frameworks to analyze resilience, the methods of calculating resilience value are still obscure. This research will review and explore the resilience framework and metrics from other fields and assess their fitness for use in healthcare systems. The resilience property of healthcare systems will be analyzed for the State of North Dakota in the United States based on the COVID-19 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The proposed resilience value is quantified from different factors such as the number of positive cases, deaths, ICU admittance, and hospitalizations in use. A case study incorporating this information to obtain a resilience value will be presented. Analyzing healthcare system resilience can aid in helping decision-makers to plan for better mitigation strategies geared toward current and future pandemic catastrophes.