Optimal in-hospital defibrillator placement

To determine if mathematical optimization of in-hospital defibrillator placements can reduce in-hospital cardiac arrest-to-defibrillator distance compared to existing defibrillators in a single hospital.

We identified treated IHCAs and defibrillator placements in St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada from Jan. 2013 to Jun. 2017 and mapped them to a 3-D computer model of the hospital. An optimization model identified an equal number of optimal defibrillator locations that minimized the average distance between IHCAs and the closest defibrillator using a 10-fold cross-validation approach. The optimized and existing defibrillator locations were compared in terms of average distance to the out-of-sample IHCAs. We repeated the analysis excluding intensive care units (ICUs), operating theatres (OTs), and the emergency department (ED). We also re-solved the model using fewer defibrillators to determine when the average distance matched the performance of existing defibrillators.

We identified 433 treated IHCAs and 53 defibrillators. Of these, 167 IHCAs and 31 defibrillators were outside of ICUs, OTs, and the ED. Optimal defibrillator placements reduced the average IHCA-to-defibrillator distance from 16.1 m to 2.7 m (relative decrease of 83.0%; P = 0.002) compared to existing defibrillator placements. For non-ICU/OT/ED IHCAs, the average distance was reduced from 24.4 m to 11.9 m (relative decrease of 51.3%; P = 0.002. 8-9 optimized defibrillator locations were sufficient to match the average IHCA-to-defibrillator distance of existing defibrillator placements.

Optimization-guided placement of in-hospital defibrillators can reduce the distance from an IHCA to the closest defibrillator. Equivalently, optimization can match existing defibrillator performance using far fewer defibrillators.