Modeling uncertain task compliance in dispatch of volunteers to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients

Abstract

In countries such as Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, projects in which volunteers are dispatched to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients with the use of mobile phones exist. Once an OHCA case is reported, a notification is sent to the mobile phones of registered volunteers that are in the vicinity of the patient. These projects mostly use static dispatch methods to determine which volunteers should be sent directly to the patient and which ones should pick up an automatic external defibrillator (AED). However, such schemes do not consider uncertainties associated with these task assignment decisions (e.g., if volunteers will do as instructed, or do something else). In this paper, we propose a method for optimized task assignment and dispatch of volunteers to OHCA patients that considers the uncertainty related to volunteers’ actions once assigned a task. We then compare the results of our method to those of a static dispatch method used in an ongoing mobile phone volunteer dispatch project in Sweden and validate them using simulation. Furthermore, we perform a sensitivity analysis on several parameters to investigate their effect on the performance of the proposed method. With the comparative results we show that the proposed method may help increase the survivability of OHCA patients.