Abstract
Emergency medical service (EMS) systems play a fundamental role in society by providing a vital service in initial emergency care. The purpose of this research is to present the first literature review of hospital selection operational decision within the context of the EMS system. The main findings were the following: The hospital selection problem is integrated with the location, dispatch, routing, and size of the ambulance fleet. The main selection criteria were closeness, hospital care capacities and the shortest queue or greatest number of free beds. The most used performance measures were the shortest transport and waiting time. Solution techniques include discrete event simulation, queuing models, mixed linear integer programming, and CPLEX and Arena software. The application of metaheuristics is scarce; mobile applications and Internet information systems have been implemented for real-time decision making. It is recommended that the design of hospital selection methods be implemented as well as the technological developments, considering the participation of the actors of the EMS system.
Highlights
The emergency medical service (EMS) refers to the ambulance service and the EMS system is an integrated general model of a public safety and health care system that includes the mechanisms for notifying medical emergencies, the provision of pre-hospital and emergency services, basic and medicalized forms of transportation, hospital care, the work of emergency regulatory centers, among others
Publications that fulfilled the following criteria were selected: 1) those that involve the operational decision of hospital selection or assignment patients to hospitals, under emergency conditions, by means of quantitative methods and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) developments; 2) those that mention hospital selection criteria, within other strategic, tactical, and operational problems, treated as main problems in these studies; and 3) those that they have identified the selection criteria of the hospital, according to the experiences of patients transferred by ambulances
Policies for assigning patients transported by ambulance to the emergency rooms of the regional hospital network were defined [22,26]
Summary
The emergency medical service (EMS) refers to the ambulance service and the EMS system is an integrated general model of a public safety and health care system that includes the mechanisms for notifying medical emergencies, the provision of pre-hospital and emergency services, basic and medicalized forms of transportation, hospital care, the work of emergency regulatory centers, among others. The purpose of EMS is to respond in a timely and efficient manner to victims of diseases and accidents that require emergency medical attention [1,2,3]. They are classified in the Anglo-American model and European Model. The importance and sensitivity of the decision making in the EMS have been recognized by operations research scientists, EMS planners and health professionals who studied problems in EMS system management [6]. Operational decisions are made in real time and are associated to relocation, dispatch, ambulances routing policies, and hospital selection [4,7,8,9]
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