Nursing homes (NHs) are responsible for caring for frail, older adults, who are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, such as hurricanes. Due to the influence of highly uncertain environmental conditions and varied NH characteristics (e.g., geo-location, staffing, residents' health conditions), the NH evacuation response, namely evacuating or sheltering-in-place, is highly uncertain. Accurate prediction of NH evacuation response is important for emergency management agencies to accurately anticipate the NH evacuation demand surge with healthcare resources proactively planned. Existing hurricane evacuation research mainly focuses on the general population. For NH evacuation, existing studies mainly focus on conceptual studies and/or qualitative analysis using a single source of data, such as surveys or resident health data. There is a lack of research to develop analytics-based method by fusing rich environmental data with NH data to improve the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Geographic Information System (GIS) data enhanced predictive analytics approach for forecasting NH evacuation response by fusing multi-source data related to storm conditions, geographical information, NH organizational characteristics as well as staffing and residents characteristics of each NH. In particular, multiple GIS features, such as distance to storm trajectory, projected wind speed, potential storm surge and NH elevation, are extracted from rich GIS information and incorporated to improve the prediction performance. A real-world case study of NH evacuation during Hurricane Irma in 2017 is examined to demonstrate superior prediction performance of the proposed work over a large number of predictive analytics methods without GIS information.
Keywords: GIS data; Hurricane evacuation; Nursing home; Predictive analytics; Vulnerable population.
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