Modeling the impact of public access defibrillator range on public location cardiac arrest coverage

Public access defibrillation with automated external defibrillators (AEDs) can improve survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) occurring in public. Increasing the effective range of AEDs may improve coverage for public location OHCAs.

To quantify the relationship between AED effective range and public location cardiac arrest coverage.

This was a retrospective cohort study using the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium Epistry database. We included all public-location, atraumatic, EMS-attended OHCAs in Toronto, Canada between December 16, 2005 and July 15, 2010. We ran a mathematical model for AED placement that maximizes coverage of historical public OHCAs given pre-specified values of AED effective range and the number of locations to place AEDs. Locations of all non-residential buildings were obtained from the City of Toronto and used as candidate sites for AED placement. Coverage was evaluated for range values from 10 to 300 m and number of AED locations from 10 to 200, both in increments of 10, for a total of 600 unique scenarios. Coverage from placing AEDs in all public buildings was also measured.

There were 1310 public location OHCAs during the study period, with 25,851 non-residential buildings identified as candidate sites for AED placement. Cardiac arrest coverage increased with AED effective range, with improvements in coverage diminishing at higher ranges. For example, for a deployment of 200 AED locations, increasing effective range from 100 m to 200 m covered an additional 15% of cardiac arrests, whereas increasing range further from 200 m to 300 m covered an additional 10%. Placing an AED in each of the 25,851 public buildings resulted in coverage of 50% and 95% under assumed effective ranges of 50 m and 300 m, respectively.

Increasing AED effective range can improve cardiac arrest coverage. Mathematical models can help evaluate the potential impact of initiatives which increase AED range.