Resource-Based Patient Prioritization in Mass-Casualty Incidents
Alex F. Mills, Nilay Tanık Argon, Serhan Ziya
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2013 · Volume 15 · Issue 3
Abstract
The most widely used standard for mass-casualty triage, START, relies on a fixed-priority ordering among different classes of patients, and does not explicitly consider resource limitations or the changes in survival probabilities with respect to time. We construct a fluid model of patient triage in a mass-casualty incident that incorporates these factors and characterize its optimal policy. We use this characterization to obtain useful insights about the type of simple policies that have a good chance to perform well in practice, and we demonstrate how one could develop such a policy. Using a realistic simulation model and data from emergency medicine literature, we show that the policy we developed based on our fluid formulation outperforms START in all scenarios considered, sometimes substantially.
Keywords
health operations, emergency response, triage
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