Ornge provides an essential service in Ontario’s highly regionalized health care system by transporting patients to definitive care in a timely manner.  To do this effectively requires seamless coordination between staff in the dispatch centre, pilots, maintenance engineers, flight paramedics and physicians.  Despite this, the demand for service often exceeds Ornge’s resources.

Optimizing use of existing resources is something that engineers are well-suited to do.  Ornge has partnered with Professor Shane Henderson at Cornell’s University’s School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.  The goal of this partnership is to find ways to improve how Ornge allocates its resources.

Providing a critical care transport system is a challenge; it combines the complexities of caring for the sick and injured with running a small airline.  It is in the latter, the “small airline”, where the principles of operations research and industrial engineering come into play.

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