DENTON (1080 KRLD) - A new software program developed at the University of North Texas could organize the COVID-19 vaccination process.
The cloud-based computer program is called RE-PLAN. Marty O’Neill, director of UNT's Center for Computational Epidemiology and Response Analysis, says it was originally developed to help public health planners respond to bioterrorism events.
"But last year, back in January, when we started seeing the coronavirus spreading in China, we decided this could be an issue here for us in the United States," O'Neill says. "We started asking ourselves: How can we take the capabilities we've established in the context of bio-emergencies and extend it to something like a mass vaccination for a global pandemic? And that's exactly what we did."
The RE-PLAN system can help public health planners choose where to place vaccination sites, collect resources for those sites, and work out how to distribute the vaccines.
"Things like language translators, how many people would you expect to see at each of the vaccination sites, and so on and so forth," O'Neill says. "All these things are done, not subjectively, but based on data that's available for each jurisdiction across the United States."
O'Neill says the program is currently being tested by health officials, but it needs more funding before it can be made available statewide.