Evaluating a real-time ambulance redeployment framework under implementation of community-based citizen responder program

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are accountable for patient survival as they provide initial time-critical professional care for life-threatening medical conditions. To improve patient survival and other health outcomes, it is crucial to shortening the time between incidence occurrence and EMS arrival. Recently, engagement of Citizen Responders (CRs) in the EMS system, with the use of connective technology solutions, has become a viable approach to augmenting EMS responses, especially in areas difficult to be accessed by professional providers in a timely manner. While many community-based CR programs have been implemented and shown promising results in saving individual lives, it remains unclear how EMS system design and operations should be coordinated with available CR support and how to make adjustments in the EMS system in preparation for the CR program implementation. In this paper, we investigate these issues in the context of real-time ambulance redeployment. Specifically, we explore how existing real-time redeployment strategies can be adjusted in presence of CRs, to further improve patients' survival. The performance of our framework is evaluated via discrete-event simulation. Our computational results confirm the improvement in patients' survival once real-time information of CR locations and availabilities is leveraged into traditional EMS operations.