A gravity model for emergency departments

Abstract

Abstract The issue of facility location is of significant importance in numerous systems, where the efficient utilisation of resources is of great importance. Gravity models, which are inspired by Newtonian physics, are commonly employed to address these problems and have a long tradition of being used in healthcare. The objective of this paper is to enhance the comprehension of patients’ decision-making processes in emergency healthcare by introducing an extension to existing gravity models, which includes two novel factors influencing emergency department choice: hospital sizes and patients’ severity. The newly formulated gravity rule, which integrates these factors, demonstrated an extremely high accuracy against real-world data in terms of overall hospital location and flows between cities and hospitals, respectively 98.77% and 98.02%.