Prioritizing Burn-Injured Patients During a Disaster

Carri W. Chan (), Linda V. Green (), Yina Lu (), Nicole Leahy () and Roger Yurt ()
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Carri W. Chan: Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Linda V. Green: Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Yina Lu: Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Nicole Leahy: New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, New York 10065
Roger Yurt: New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, New York 10065

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2013, vol. 15, issue 2, 170-190

Abstract: The U.S. government has mandated that, in a catastrophic event, metropolitan areas need to be capable of caring for 50 burn-injured patients per million population. In New York City, this corresponds to 400 patients. There are currently 140 burn beds in the region, which can be surged up to 210. To care for additional patients, hospitals without burn centers will be used to stabilize patients until burn beds become available. In this work, we develop a new system for prioritizing patients for transfer to burn beds as they become available and demonstrate its superiority over several other triage methods. Based on data from previous burn catastrophes, we study the feasibility of being able to admit 400 patients to burn beds within the critical three- to five-day time frame. We find that this is unlikely and that the ability to do so is highly dependent on the type of event and the demographics of the patient population. This work has implications for how disaster plans in other metropolitan areas should be developed.

Keywords: healthcare; disaster planning; triage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormsom:v:15:y:2013:i:2:p:170-190

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