Districting and dispatching policies for emergency medical service systems to improve patient survival

Abstract

The major focus of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) system is to save lives and to minimize the effects of emergency health incidents. Districting, or designing pre-determined response areas, allows an EMS system to reduce the response time of paramedic support to the incident. Furthermore, dispatching policies affect system performance. Thus, in this study we propose integrated dispatching and districting policies to improve the performance of EMS systems. We measure performance in terms of patient survival probability. We propose several policies for districting/dispatching, these are provided as inputs to a simulation model that compares the performance of different policies. Our response areas, or districts, are designed using a constructive heuristic which considers adjusted expected coverage. Intra-district and inter-district dispatching policies are developed considering the degree of the urgency of the call. Computational results show that integrated districting and dispatching policies are vital in increasing patient survivability.