Modeling Emergency Medical Service Volunteer Response

How should volunteers be dispatched to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases?

“…An extension where some volunteers are dispatched directly to the OHCA, while others are routed to pick up a nearby automated external defibrillator (AED), would be valuable. (Related work on AED positioning in a city that does not account for volunteer dispatching is referenced in [4].) Finally, these dynamic programs could be solved in real time, perhaps necessitating trade-offs between speed and model fidelity/quality of solution, or solved offline to obtain policies that can be rapidly employed in real time.…”

“…For simplicity we do not distinguish between ambulance and volunteer response here, though that is important in practice. Estimates of f and more complex versions exist; see [4]. The problem we wish to solve is to maximize the probability of survival subject to a bound on the expected number of alerted volunteers, i.e., to maximize E f (R) subject to E(N ) ≤ b, where b is a budget on the number of volunteer alerts.…”

“…There is a growing medical literature on volunteer schemes for OHCA that primarily focuses on data analysis. [4] gives an overview and develops stochastic models that can help determine the number and location of volunteers needed to materially improve survival rates. Here we discuss a problem related to volunteer dispatch.…”