Improving Red Cross EMS Operations in Tijuana, Mexico


A long-term project towards improving emergency medical services. UC San Diego - Global TIES Program. I started out as another student in a lab class but there were aspirations from the Red Cross in Tijuana (RCT) and the professor that were not yet attained. With just 13 ambulances servicing 2-3 million people in Tijuana at the time, one route towards improving the state of emergency medical services (EMS) was to modernize the technological infrastructure in the Red Cross. One past work determined an optimal set of ambulance standby stations that would maximize coverage in the city, which became partially implemented. In my first quarter, I prototyped and demonstrated live location tracking and historical pathing accumulation that would help keep track of the very limited number of ambulances in service. In the following two quarters, I gradually led more of the project starting with the mobile app subteam and peaking at managing the overall project and keeping in touch with 4-5 subteam leaders. We improved the RCT's internal data collection from traditional, manual methods like pen and paper to using computers and wrote web applications that allowed them to take advantage of expanding cell data availability (see [5]).


After my first 3 quarters, I attempted to tackle a larger problem that researchers have been working on: dynamically optimizing resource allocation (including but not limited to ambulance positions) to maintain city-wide coverage while accounting for additional contexts such as time of day and severity of emergency cases. Simulating a dynamic and chaotic world to produce estimations and outcomes is challenging. We showed that a reduction in ambulances (for example, suppose many ambulances happen to become busy at the same time because several emergencies occurred simultaneously) can drastically reduce coverage in Tijuana but it is possible to react accordingly to reallocate resources to reduce loss of coverage while maintaining a required level of quality of service (such as ambulance response times). However, in all simulations, a widespread disaster at almost any scale will plummet the ability to address emergency cases. This is due to the extremely constrained number of ambulances. These simulated findings can demonstrate a strong need to allocate more EMS resources for the RCT.