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

• The seminar featured Ángel Ruiz Bartolome full professor at the Faculty of Business Administration at Laval University, Canada.
• Ángel Ruiz Bartolome has collaborated with BCAM’s researchers María Merino and Imanol Gago in their work within the health project BMTF - Basque Modeling Task Force.

On April 7th, BCAM hosted a seminar focused on patient transportation, organized by its Combinatorial Optimization research line. The event featured Ángel Ruiz Bartolome from Laval University (Canada) as the guest speaker.

The presentation was divided into two main parts. The first part addressed emergency transportation, presenting the response process to health emergencies and current approaches to ambulance fleet planning and management. Strategic (location) and tactical (location-allocation) models were briefly reviewed, highlighting their scope and limitations. Some basic formulations for these problems were also discussed.

The second part extended the study to non-emergency patient transportation services, which are often carried out by similar vehicle fleets and even managed by the same organizations, although independently from emergency services. A viable model was proposed that allows the transfer of vehicles between emergency and non-emergency fleets depending on the state of each system, together with a scheme of negotiated service levels between the managers of both fleets. Numerical results confirmed significant performance improvements derived from the proposed shared resource management scheme, compared to the scenario where fleets are managed independently.

This seminar provided valuable insights into the current challenges in patient transportation and emphasized the importance of optimizing resource management to improve efficiency and service quality in both emergency and non-emergency contexts.

Ángel Ruiz Bartolomé is a full professor at the Faculty of Business Administration at Laval University, Canada. He received his doctoral degree in Systems Control from the University of Technology of Compiègne, France. His research focuses on the application of operations research to the organization of healthcare services, including the development of decision support tools for the management of waiting lists and patient prioritization, the design of logistical plans for the control of contagious and non-contagious diseases, as well as patient transportation and the management of emergency medical services.

Ángel Ruiz Bartolome has collaborated with BCAM’s researchers María Merino and Imanol Gago in their work within the health project BMTF - Basque Modeling Task Force.