BCAM Scientific Seminar | A capacity-shared approach to improve the performance of emergency and non-emergency patient transportation fleets

Abstract

This presentation on patient transportation is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on emergency transportation and introduces the response process to health emergencies and current approaches to ambulance fleet planning and management. Strategic (location) and tactical (location-allocation) models will be briefly reviewed, and their scope and limitations will be discussed. Finally, some basic formulations for these problems will be examined.

The second part adds to the study the services of non-emergency patient transportation, which in many cases are carried out by similar vehicle fleets and even managed by the same organizations, although separately from emergency services. We propose a viable model that allows the transfer of vehicles between emergency and non-emergency fleets according to the state of each system and a scheme of negotiated service levels between the managers of the two fleets. Numerical results confirm the performance improvements derived from the proposed shared resource management scheme with respect to the case where fleets are managed independently.