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Emergency medical service (EMS) providers are charged with the task of managing ambulances so that the time required to respond to emergency calls is minimized. One approach that may assist in reducing response times is ambulance redeployment, i.e., repositioning idle ambulances in real time. We formulate a simulation model of EMS operations to evaluate the performance of a given allocation policy...
A simulation of an influenza pandemic is analyzed for the greater Ann Arbor, Michigan region. Focus is placed on a Pandemic Urgent Care center (PUC), where patients of mild and moderate severity are treated. The number of registration assistants, doctors, and nurses to staff as well as the amount of capacity to add to the PUC and adjoining infusion clinic is analyzed for different attack rates. Focus...
The Norwegian Board of Health Supervision has strongly recommended that all hospitals need to take action to improve the long waiting times before patients are seen by a physician in the Hospital Emergency Department. Akershus University Hospital has complied with this by introducing physician triage every weekday from 10 am to 7 pm. Because it is difficult to see the influence this has had on the...
The overcrowding of Emergency Departments (EDs) is a well-known problem that has been analyzed on multiple occasions. Queuing theory and simulation have been applied extensively to specific ED situations, such as staff planning, waiting time reduction and capacity investment. However, there are remaining problems in the EDs that need more study. One of them is the ambulance diversion, which may cause...
In Germany demand for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) physicians is outstripping supply. Telematic Rescue Assistance Systems (TRAS) offer the opportunity to use EMS physicians more efficiently by reducing the on-scene time. By transmitting audio, vital signs and video data telematically, they bring the expertise of a remote elder EMS physician, a hospital or otherwise specialized institution to the...
In the past, only the security and confidentiality of data in medical information systems was a contentious issue, and privacy was not a real issue. Lately, much has been done to preserve the privacy of information of the individual, especially when this resulted in giving the individual more control over his/her personal information. The problem that we are faced with now, is the following: From...
The context-aware computing is a research field that defines systems capable of adapting their behavior according to any relevant information about entities (e.g., people, places and objects) of interest. Ubiquitous systems are closely related to the use of contexts and are frequently shared among multiple users, once they are designed to be embedded into everyday environments such as houses, cars,...
Although substantial progress was made in improving the sharing of patient medical information among healthcare providers, professionals still need to address the issue of efficient electronic medical records. Thus, real-time information presents a persistent challenge to the emergency response community. In emergency situations, particularly with unconscious, incoherent and unaccompanied patients,...
This paper suggests an architecture for supporting discrete event simulations that is based upon using executable process definitions and separate components for specifying resources. The paper describes the architecture and indicates how it might be used to suggest efficiency improvements for hospital emergency departments (EDs). Preliminary results suggest that the proposed architecture provides...
In this project our goal is to create a health monitoring system that can transmit the vital signs of a patient through an ad-hoc wireless sensor network for a mass causality emergency application. The health monitoring device is to be placed on an injured victim during an emergency and act as a sensor node to connect to a wireless ad-hoc network to transmit the patient's vital sign data. The target...
This paper describes the simulation modeling for planning for the efficient transportation of patients following an earthquake disaster. Research was performed in an effort to predict the consequences of conceivable scenarios. Discrete-event simulation modeling provided an effective supplement to disaster response procedures when simultaneously interface with and drive both planning systems and training...
The paper presents a fingerprint based identification solution, integrated with a communication system in order to support and improve the activity of emergency services on large areas, in accidents implying multiple victims. In such situations, due to possible post-accident effects, it is difficult to obtain the victims' identity data. Consequently, the occasional patients must be local-identified...
In the mobile (M)-health domain, the remote patient monitoring system (RPMS) facilitates continuous collection, transmission and viewing of the patient vital signs data. Furthermore, in case of an emergency it provides context-aware emergency response services (ERSs) such as the doctor, paramedic, ambulance and hospital to the patient. In the existing RPMS, the components responsible for the discovery...
This research explores how a wide range of automobile crash, emergency responder, hospital, and trauma information could be useful to emergency medical practitioners for making decisions about automobile crash victims. We use a framework from prior research to consider, devise and examine emergency medical practitioner use of information systems for improving emergency response services and outcomes...
In this paper we show how action research contributes to the design of health information systems by constructing knowledge addressing users' concerns in a timely manner. Our aim conducting action research is to understand the work practices of the expected users and to bring this understanding to the design, ensuring that we are enabling users rather than constraining their work. We view this process...
One of the key challenges to health care access in Canadian hospitals is growing overcrowding of the Emergency Departments (EDs), leading to the medical personnel overload, and the excessive waiting times to receive proper care. These adverse effects directly impact the patient satisfaction levels, the ability of the medical professionals to attend promptly to patients?? health issues, and generate...
Hospital emergency departments in the US are facing increasing challenges due to growth in patient demand for their services, and inability to increase capacity to match demand. We report on a new approach to patient flow in emergency departments, and a simulation model of the approach. Initial results from the model show that the approach is feasible, and a pilot study demonstrates substantial improvements...
Facilities layout represents one of the most significant opportunities for expanding and improving the performance of any system including healthcare. This paper reports on work done to evaluate a revised layout of the emergency department of a public hospital. The objectives of revising the layout were: 1) improving patient satisfaction through minimizing patient waiting time, and 2) expanding the...
Emergency response is a time critical work that needs team work from different organizations with various specialties. It also needs to integrate existing information system to collect and assemble necessary knowledge and resources for critical emerging tasks and use it for collaborative problem solving. As the amount of Web services in e-governments grows continuously, building virtual organization...
This paper describes the simulation modeling for planning for the efficient transportation of patients following a disaster. Research was performed in an effort to predict the consequences of conceivable scenarios. Discrete-event simulation modeling provided an effective supplement to regular drill procedures when training emergency medical services personnel. Initial performance of the redesigned...
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