Emergency Department Management in Lazio, Italy

The assignment of service requests to emergency departments is of paramount importance both from a life-threatening and an economical viewpoints. In the process of a more general project that aims at defining optimal allocation policies of patients to regional hospital network facilities (together with the potential reorganization of the facilities), the Department of Epidemiology of the Regional Health Service of Lazio, Italy, was interested in obtaining a completely offline picture of the effect of an optimal assignment of requests to emergency departments. This is in the spirit of evaluating the so-called Price of Anarchy, where the fully centralized (admittedly unrealistic) allocation is used as a reference for both the state-of-the-art completely decentralized approach and future reorganization ideas.