Management and Visualization Tools for Emergency Medical Services

TL;DR

This paper presents an online visualization and simulation tool for emergency medical services that integrates statistical modeling, dispatch simulation, and performance analysis, aiding in decision-making and system evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile online platform for visualizing emergency data, simulating ambulance dispatch, and analyzing performance metrics, with customizable dispatch algorithms.

Findings

The tool effectively visualizes emergency locations and ambulance movements.

It enables simulation of different dispatch strategies and their impact.

It provides accessible data and performance metrics for EMS systems.

Abstract

This paper describes an online tool for the visualization of medical emergency locations, randomly generated sample paths of medical emergencies, and the animation of ambulance movements under the control of various dispatch methods in response to these emergencies. The tool incorporates statistical models for forecasting emergency locations and call arrival times, the simulation of emergency arrivals and ambulance movement trajectories, and the computation and visualization of performance metrics such as ambulance response time distributions. Data for the Rio de Janeiro Emergency Medical Service are available on the website. A user can upload emergency data for any Emergency Medical Service, and can then use the visualization tool to explore the uploaded data. A user can also use the statistical tools and/or the simulation tool with any of the dispatch methods provided, and can then use the visualization tool to explore the computational output. Future enhancements include the ability of a user to embed additional dispatch algorithms into the simulation; the tool can then be used to visualize the simulation results obtained with the newly embedded algorithms.