MedicAid Disaster Estimator (MADE): A Digital Tool for Humanitarian Relief Material Demand Estimations

When disaster strikes, relief organizations experience an immediate need to supply necessities such as food, water, and medical supplies. Resource demand calculation is vital for relief organizations to efficiently mitigate the impact of disasters. Although large humanitarian organizations have private demand estimators, a plethora of local organizations that respond to disasters worldwide lack access to a demand calculator. Academic articles have introduced mathematical models for disaster needs analysis, but their findings and resulting calculators have remained largely limited to the academic community due to the lack of applicable technology. To address this gap between research and technology, the MedicAid Disaster Estimator (MADE), a user-friendly and accessible website was created to forecast the demand for water, food, and medicine in a natural disaster. The website utilizes static calculations to scale per person/ per day recommendations of water, food, and medication to the user’s specified number of people and days. The scale factors, or per person/per day recommendations, were informed by credible industry leaders such as the World Health Organization, Sphere, the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists, the World Food Program, and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund to ensure that calculations are reliable. HTML and CSS were used for front-end web development, and Python was used for back-end development. Industry experts were interviewed to inform the scope and future directions.