Publication

Abstract : Effective dissemination of emergency healthcare is a huge challenge in rural and sub-urban areas of developing countries like India. Precious time is lost when an ambulance is not found on time or when the victim is taken to a hospital not relevant to the emergency. Such instances often cause loss of patient's life in critical cases. Considering that all emergency cases are highly critical in nature, such loss of time is unacceptable in the healthcare industry. In this paper, we have addressed these issues by the means of a smartphone application which helps in searching for a nearby ambulance and thereafter scan the real-time database for a relevant healthcare center. Studies have been carried out in the city of Mysore, India with respect to the healthcare center specialties and service availability. Even though the survey was done in a city, the application presented in this paper is suitable for rural areas also. Different filtering parameters such as specialization, equipment availability, service availability and number of beds available in the emergency ward have been considered in the application. With the help of these parameters, effective filtering of the healthcare centers is performed by the application engine. Multiple phases of iterative filtering assist the ambulance paramedic to narrow down the search of healthcare centers to a single, highly relevant one. Our experimentation with the application shows a very high efficiency of the healthcare center selection when compared with a survey of healthcare centers and facilities that we had undertaken.