Optimal Dispatch of Volunteers to Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest Patients

Matinrad, Niki; Granberg, Tobias Andersson; Vogel, Nicklas Ennab; Angelakis, Vangelis

doi:10.24251/hicss.2019.496

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Emergency response apps, commonly smartphone based, are increasingly being used to identify and dispatch volunteer first responders (VFRs) to the location of a medical emergency [ 1 ]. Automated dispatch algorithms generally rely on a simple estimated time of arrival (ETA) calculation based on the locations of the VFRs and the incident as well as the known modes of transport.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive Dispatch of Volunteer First Responders: Algorithm Development and Validation

Khalemsky,

Lankenau

et al. 2023

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background Smartphone-based emergency response apps are increasingly being used to identify and dispatch volunteer first responders (VFRs) to medical emergencies to provide faster first aid, which is associated with better prognoses. Volunteers’ availability and willingness to respond are uncertain, leading in recent studies to response rates of 17% to 47%. Dispatch algorithms that select volunteers based on their estimated time of arrival (ETA) without considering the likelihood of response may be suboptimal due to a large percentage of alerts wasted on VFRs with shorter ETA but a low likelihood of response, resulting in delays until a volunteer who will actually respond can be dispatched. Objective This study aims to improve the decision-making process of human emergency medical services dispatchers and autonomous dispatch algorithms by presenting a novel approach for predicting whether a VFR will respond to or ignore a given alert. Methods We developed and compared 4 analytical models to predict VFRs’ response behaviors based on emergency event characteristics, volunteers’ demographic data and previous experience, and condition-specific parameters. We tested these 4 models using 4 different algorithms applied on actual demographic and response data from a 12-month study of 112 VFRs who received 993 alerts to respond to 188 opioid overdose emergencies. Model 4 used an additional dynamically updated synthetic dichotomous variable, frequent responder, which reflects the responder’s previous behavior. Results The highest accuracy (260/329, 79.1%) of prediction that a VFR will ignore an alert was achieved by 2 models that used events data, VFRs’ demographic data, and their previous response experience, with slightly better overall accuracy (248/329, 75.4%) for model 4, which used the frequent responder indicator. Another model that used events data and VFRs’ previous experience but did not use demographic data provided a high-accuracy prediction (277/329, 84.2%) of ignored alerts but a low-accuracy prediction (153/329, 46.5%) of responded alerts. The accuracy of the model that used events data only was unacceptably low. The J48 decision tree algorithm provided the best accuracy. Conclusions VFR dispatch has evolved in the last decades, thanks to technological advances and a better understanding of VFR management. The dispatch of substitute responders is a common approach in VFR systems. Predicting the response behavior of candidate responders in advance of dispatch can allow any VFR system to choose the best possible response candidates based not only on ETA but also on the probability of actual response. The integration of the probability to respond into the dispatch algorithm constitutes a new generation of individual dispatch, making this one of the first studies to harness the power of predictive analytics for VFR dispatch. Our findings can help VFR network administrators in their continual efforts to improve the response times of their networks and to save lives.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive Dispatch of Volunteer First Responders: Algorithm Development and Validation

Khalemsky,

Lankenau

et al. 2023

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Digitalized Cross-Sector Collaboration for an Effective Emergency Response: Emerging Forms of Network Governance

Pilemalm

Mojir

2023

Public Administration and Information Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A review on initiatives for the management of daily medical emergencies prior to the arrival of emergency medical services

Matinrad

Reuter-Oppermann

2021

Cent Eur J Oper Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emergency services worldwide face increasing cost pressure that potentially limits their existing resources. In many countries, emergency services also face the issues of staff shortage–creating extra challenges and constraints, especially during crisis times such as the COVID-19 pandemic–as well as long distances to sparsely populated areas resulting in longer response times. To overcome these issues and potentially reduce consequences of daily (medical) emergencies, several countries, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, have started initiatives using new types of human resources as well as equipment, which have not been part of the existing emergency systems before. These resources are employed in response to medical emergency cases if they can arrive earlier than emergency medical services (EMS). A good number of studies have investigated the use of these new types of resources in EMS systems, from medical, technical, and logistical perspectives as their study domains. Several review papers in the literature exist that focus on one or several of these new types of resources. However, to the best of our knowledge, no review paper that comprehensively considers all new types of resources in emergency medical response systems exists. We try to fill this gap by presenting a broad literature review of the studies focused on the different new types of resources, which are used prior to the arrival of EMS. Our objective is to present an application-based and methodological overview of these papers, to provide insights to this important field and to bring it to the attention of researchers as well as emergency managers and administrators.

show abstract

Optimal Dispatch of Volunteers to Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest Patients

Cited by 4 publications

References 27 publications

Predictive Dispatch of Volunteer First Responders: Algorithm Development and Validation

Predictive Dispatch of Volunteer First Responders: Algorithm Development and Validation

Digitalized Cross-Sector Collaboration for an Effective Emergency Response: Emerging Forms of Network Governance

A review on initiatives for the management of daily medical emergencies prior to the arrival of emergency medical services

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About