Modeling the Impact of Community First Responders

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: van den Berg, Pieter L.; Henderson, Shane G.; Jagtenberg, Caroline J.; Li, Hemeng
• 署名单位: Erasmus University Rotterdam; Erasmus University Rotterdam - Excl Erasmus MC; Cornell University; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.04024
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: Poisson point process; community first responders; volunteer alert; out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

摘要

In community first responder (CFR) systems, traditional emergency service response is augmented by a network of trained volunteers who are dispatched via an app. A central application of such systems is out -of -hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), where a very fast response is crucial. For a target performance level, how many volunteers are needed, and from which locations should they be recruited? We model the presence of volunteers throughout a region as a Poisson point process, which permits the computation of the response -time distribution of the first -arriving volunteer. Combining this with known survival -rate functions, we deduce survival probabilities in the cardiac arrest setting. We then use convex optimization to compute a location distribution of volunteers across the region that optimizes either the fraction of incidents with a fast response (a common measure in the industry) or patient survival in the case of OHCA. The optimal location distribution provides a bound on the best possible performance with a given number of volunteers. This can be used to determine whether introducing a CFR system in a new region is worthwhile or can serve as a guide for additional recruitment in existing systems. Effective target areas for recruitment are not always obvious because volunteers recruited from one area may be found in various areas across the city depending on the time of day; we explicitly capture this issue. We demonstrate these methods through an extended case study of Auckland, New Zealand.