Load Balancing for Disaster Recovery and Management

In this paper, the design and working of a patient load balancing system is described to enhance the automated patient handling in mass disasters involving scores of injured victims. The MEDTOC system developed earlier is augmented to handle the larger size of disasters resulting from mass casualty events. This load balancing system can be deployed urgently if the scope of the disaster is larger than estimated initially. It starts to operate when a large number of patients have been assigned to area hospitals and some hospitals have become overloaded. This system assigns affinity values to patients based on their trauma condition and moves the selected patients between hospitals until all the hospitals have stabilized. The system is implemented on a simulated disaster and results are presented. The results show improvement in the load conditions of hospitals.