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Transportation Scheduling Method for Patients in MCI using Electronic Triage Tag

Authors:
Teruhiro Mizumoto
Weihua Sun
Keiichi Yasumoto
Minoru Ito

Keywords: ambulance scheduling; disaster management; disaster medicine; electronic triage.

Abstract:
A method for determining the priority of patients treatments called triage is used to direct rescue activities during a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI). In present disaster medicine, patients with the highest priority (with a red tag attached) are transported to the hospital in random order, although their expected probability of survival (Ps) may differ. Recently, an electronic triage tag (E-triage) that is able to sense the patient’s vital signs in real time has been developed. Moreover, based on the sensed vital signs, the physician’s remarks about the patient, and medical treatment statistics, each patient’s Ps can be estimated. In this paper, utilizing E-triage and the latest medical treatment statistics, we first formulate the problem of determining a transportation order of patients that maximizes the life-saving ratio, given the latest vital signs and temporal variation in the survival probability of each patient, the time for an ambulance to transport the patient to an appropriate hospital, and other factors. Since this problem is NP-hard, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on a greedy method that transports patients in the increasing order of their expected survival probability at the time they will arrive and be treated at the hospital. To prevent the case that rescuing a patient earlier results in the death of two or more patients, our proposed algorithm also considers, for each low survival probability patient, the two cases of rescuing the patient or not and derives the transportation order that keeps the most patients alive. Through simulations, we confirmed that the proposed method can transport about a 25% larger number of patients to the hospital before their expected survival probability gets lower than a marginal probability than conventional methods.

Pages: 156 to 163

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: February 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-119-9

Location: Gosier, Guadeloupe, France

Dates: from February 23, 2011 to February 28, 2011