Published Paper Details:

In the face of escalating challenges in emergency healthcare services, achieving resilience has emerged as a critical objective. This research paper examines the potential of a location-based emergency ambulance booking system to bolster resilience. By embracing digitalization, sustainability, and sectoral transformation, this study addresses the urgent needs of the healthcare system. Through a comprehensive mixed-methods approach, including semi-structured interviews and a web-based survey, valuable insights are gathered from patients, hospitals, and healthcare service providers. Leveraging geolocation technology, Ambu Finder identifies nearby hospitals with available ambulance services, enabling prompt responses and reduced emergency response times. Additionally, the application, developed using React Native for the mobile platform, offers registered users the convenience of uploading their medical reports, ensuring hospitals are wellprepared to handle critical situations. This research sheds light on the transformative role of digitalization, sustainability, and sectoral transformation in enhancing resilience within emergency healthcare services. By emphasizing the integration of these three pillars and leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as cloud storage, the study underscores their pivotal significance in the successful implementation of the location-based emergency ambulance booking system. The findings provide crucial insights for healthcare stakeholders and offer recommendations for further research and practical implications, ultimately paving the way toward a more resilient healthcare system. Ambulance diversion is a dangerous repercussion of emergency department (ED) crowding and can reflect fragmentation and a lack of coordination in designating optimal patient offload sites for prehospital providers. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether proactive destination selection through the Regional Emergency Patient Access and Coordination (REPAC) program would enhance capacity and ED flow management. Ambulance diversion is a common phenomenon that is invoked in some EMS systems when an ED is perceived to have exceeded its capacity to care for new patients. Institutions may also divert ambulances if they do not have the appropriate facilities, such as operating rooms, intensive care units, or the trained specialists for the specific patient population or injury incurred. Diversion has been invoked as a safety measure that improves the care both for patients in the overwhelmed ED and for those being diverted away. However, ambulance diversion is also a reflection of the inability of receiving hospitals to manage fluctuations in demand, can result in deleterious outcomes for patients, and places strain on EMS systems in terms of their ability to deliver service to the population. Bypass routing for EMS crews, whereby providers must frequently travel longer distances to find a nondiverted ED, is also another concern. Integration and coordination of both prehospital and receiving hospital systems into functional networks of care on a regional scale may result in the more efficient and rational provision of emergency services and may mitigate the effects of ED crowding on ambulance diversion. Regionalization within EMS care is a notion that seeks to manage the flow of patients in a manner that takes a broad, multicenter view of transport demand and connects it with receiving hospital supply so as to optimize resource utilization. We hypothesized that optimizing the process of EMS patient allocation through a regionalized and real-time dashboard program would mitigate the access disparities and transport inefficiencies resulting from rising levels of ED crowding. Specifically, our objective was to evaluate whether proactive destination selection through a real-time, online system would enhance the ability of our region's hospitals to absorb the load of EMS transports as reflected through reduced diversion and sustained periods in a favorable receiving status.