Can we optimize locations of hospitals by minimizing the number of patients at risk?

BACKGROUND: To reduce risk of death in acute ST-segment elevation myocardial infraction (STEMI), patients must reach a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) within 120 min from the start of symptoms. Current hospital locations represent choices made long since and may not provide the best possibilities for optimal care of STEMI patients. Open questions are: (1) how the hospital locations could be better optimized to reduce the number of patients residing over 90 min from PCI capable hospitals, and (2) how this would affect other factors like average travel time. METHODS: We formulated the research question as a facility optimization problem, which was solved by clustering method using road network and efficient travel time estimation based on overhead graph. The method was implemented as an interactive web tool and tested using nationwide health care register data collected during 2015–2018 in Finland. RESULTS: The results show that the number of patients at risk for not receiving optimal care could theoretically be reduced significantly from 5 to 1%. However, this would be achieved at the cost of increasing average travel time from 35 to 49 min. By minimizing average travel time, the clustering would result in better locations leading to a slight decrease in travel time (34 min) with only 3% patients at risk. CONCLUSIONS: The results showed that minimizing the number of patients at risk alone can significantly improve this single factor but, at the same time, increase the average burden of others. A more appropriate optimization should consider more factors. We also note that the hospitals serve also for other operators than STEMI patients. Although optimization of the entire health care system is a very complex optimization problems goal, it should be the aim of future research.