BACKGROUND Although the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) is widely used by emergency medical services (EMS) dispatchers to determine dispatch priority, there is little evidence that it reflects patient acuity. The Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) is a standard patient acuity scale widely used by Canadian emergency departments and EMS systems to prioritize patient care requirements...

This paper derives exact results for a polling system such as a token bus or token ring with exhaustive service and priority polling. The results can also be used to analyze a terminal controller with a general-service order table. There are N stations in the system and the token is passed among them according to a polling table of length M (>N). Stations are given higher priority by being list...

OBJECTIVE This case study describes the priority-setting process undertaken by health care providers in the Municipal District of Taber, Alta., to improve and integrate chronic disease services within a fixed budget. METHODS Providers first reviewed the current chronic disease management system, then considered alternatives based on program priorities and costs and benefits of potential chang...

In a context of ever increasing demand, the recent economic downturn has placed further pressure on decision-makers to effectively target healthcare resources. Over recent years there has been a push to develop more explicit evidence-based priority-setting processes, which aim to be transparent and inclusive in their approach and a number of analytical tools and sources of evidence have been de...

BACKGROUND The Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) is a commonly used computer-based emergency medical dispatch (EMD) system that is widely used to prioritize 9-1-1 calls and optimize resource allocation. There are five major priority classes used to dispatch 9-1-1 calls in the San Francisco System; Alpha codes are the lowest priority (lowest expected acuity) and Echo are the highest priori...

A task scheduling simulator for timing analysis of the various task sets with different scheduling policies was implemented and tested. The simulator supports the various scheduling policies like Rate Monotonic, deadline monotonic and EDF, widely used for scheduling real time applications. It simulates the task execution for the time period, and then it outputs the time based representation of ...

We show that certain twisting deformations of a family of supersolvable groups are simple as Hopf algebras. These groups are direct products of two generalized dihedral groups. Examples of this construction arise in dimensions 60 and pq, for prime numbers p, q with q|p − 1. We also show that certain twisting deformation of the symmetric group is simple as a Hopf algebra. On the other hand, we p...