Title
Improving emergency service in rural areas: a bi-objective covering location model for EMS systems.
Abstract
Emergency medical service (EMS) systems are public services that often provide the first line of response to urgent health care needs within a community. Unfortunately, it has been widely documented that large disparities in access to care exist between rural and urban communities. While rural EMS is provided through a variety of resources (e.g. air ambulances, volunteer corps, etc.), in this paper we focus on ground ambulatory care. In particular our goal is to balance the level of first-response ambulatory service provided to patients in urban and rural areas by locating ambulances at appropriate stations. In traditional covering location models the objective is to maximize demand that can be covered; consequently, these models favor locating ambulances in more densely populated areas, resulting in longer response times for patients in more rural areas. To address the issue of fairness in semi-rural/semi-urban communities, we propose three bi-objective covering location models that directly consider fairness via a secondary objective. Results are discussed and compared which provide a menu of alternatives to policy makers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1007/s10479-011-0972-6
Annals OR
Keywords
Field
DocType
Emergency medical service,Facility location,Bi-objective optimization,Discrete optimization
Health care,Facility location problem,Rural area,Ambulatory care,Location model,Lines of response,Mathematics,Operations management,Air Ambulances
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
221
1
0254-5330
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
0.89
12
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sunarin Chanta1543.01
Maria E. Mayorga210711.08
Laura A. Mclay319215.16