Challenges in Providing Prompt and Definitive Care to Trauma Patients

Trauma injury (due to motor vehicle crash, falls, and gunshots) is the #1 cause of death among US citizens <45 years old and #3 overall across all ages, with an economic burden of $671 billion annually. Recent literature suggests that geographical maldistribution of Trauma Centers (TCs), and the resultant increase in the access time to the nearest TC, could impact patient safety and increase disability or mortality. In this talk we will discuss our collaboration with the Trauma Division at a Midwestern US state. Starting with the typical process of how care is provided to a trauma victim at the scene, we will briefly discuss key strategic and operational challenges. One of the strategic challenges is to determine the number and location of TCs to improve patient safety, for which we introduce the Trauma Center Location Problem. We will share insights derived from testing our approach on real data from a midwestern US state. We strongly believe that our proposed approach can help state trauma decision makers in (i) benchmarking their current network against our optimal solution and (ii) conducting ‘what-if’ analysis to evaluate the viability of a proposal (from a local health system) to upgrade an NTC to a TC.