Paper
A time efficient heart attack pre-hospital management methodology based on collaborative scheduling using constraint optimization
- Authors:
- L. Gortzis; S. Zimeras; Ch. Pylarinou
- Abstract
- The task of medical diagnosis is a complex one, considering the level vagueness and uncertainty management, especially when the disease has multiple symptoms. The management of effective diagnosis depends on factors dealing with heart attack incidents and pre-hospital service of the patient. Although heart attack has no strict medical definition it is commonly used to indicate a sudden and potentially life threatening abnormality of heart function. Important factor in a heart attack incident (with severe results sometimes) is the efficient handling of the time especially on the interval time management starting from the moment the incident is recognized up to the time the patient is in the emergency unit. Time management of the incident could be achieved by controlling the time constraints proposing a methodology where the pre-hospital service is treated as a process consisted by three stages. Best solutions of the time constrains could be calculated considering constraint optimization techniques. A case study of five of heart attack reported incidents is analyzed and the results indicate the possible contribution of the application of this methodology. This methodology appears to be very useful, thanks to its ability not only to generate an effective initial schedule as an additional guidance to all participants involved in heart attack service, but also to respond to changes occurred once the first actions have started and abrupt complications necessitate additional or updated actions.
- Keywords
- pre-hospital service; constraint optimization; process scheduling; heart attack
- StartPage
- 29
- EndPage
- 34
- Doi