Improving Quantification of Medical Evacuation Risk for Human Spaceflight in the IMPACT Model

Traditionally, mission planners have used a heuristic and qualitative approach to design medical systems based on prior experience however this approach may result in high variability and implicit bias to design and could put missions and crewmembers at risk. The Informing Mission Planning through Analysis of Complex Tradespaces (IMPACT) tool is a probabilistic risk assessment tool designed by NASA to model medical risk in long duration missions outside of low earth orbit (LEO). This tool can quantify risk metrics such as risk of crewmember death, loss of crew task time, and the need for medical evacuation to better inform and augment the more traditional approach to medical system design. The risk metric of Return to Definitive Care (RTDC) represents the likelihood of requiring medical evacuation and has been difficult to quantify in a reliable and standardized manner. Initial development of the RTDC metric was constrained due to the complexity of a medical evacuation decision and the lack of prior spaceflight data and this presentation will discuss the review and improvement process used to increase model accuracy and fidelity.