Modeling requirements for an emergency medical service system design evaluator

Abstract

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) consists of a chain of processes that encompass the on-scene management, patient transport, and care provision at an ED. Much research has been conducted in order to improve EMS design, and simulations are commonly used to evaluate EMS design. In many cases, a specific component of an EMS system is selected to model aspects relevant to the analysis, while the other EMS components are treated as model inputs and assumptions. This could lead to a fragmentary assessment because it does not capture the complexity of real EMS operations. Ideally, EMS designs should be evaluated by a model that represents the entire chain of EMS operations. In this paper, a wide spectrum of operation design problems of EMS systems and simulation models used in previous studies are examined. Then, a set of modeling requirements are defined and a model framework is proposed for EMS system design evaluator.