An emergency medical services transfer authorization center in response to the Toronto severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak*1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe the rapid development and implementation of an innovative emergency medical services (EMS) command, control, and tracking system to mitigate the risk of iatrogenic spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) among health care facilities, health care workers, and patients in Ontario, Canada, as a result of interfacility patient transfers. METHODS: A working group of stakeholders in health care and transport medicine developed and implemented a medically based command, control, and tracking center for all interfacility (including acute and long-term care) patient transfers in Ontario, Canada. Development and implementation took place in three distinct but overlapping phases: needs assessment, design and implementation, and expansion and ongoing operations. RESULTS: The needs assessment, design, and implementation were completed in less than 48 hours using existing EMS infrastructure and personnel. The center was successfully handling more than 500 requests for interfacility patient transfer per day within 36 hours of operation and more than 1,100 requests per day within two weeks. Expansion into a new physical space enables 40 staff to process up to 1,500 requests per day. There was no reported spread of SARS resulting from interfacility patient transfers since the center began operation on April 1, 2003, and anecdotal evidence demonstrates it identified up to 13 new SARS cases. The center continues to operate as a part of Ontario's commitment as a result of diligence in transport medicine and infection control, even though no new cases of SARS were reported since June 12, 2003. Further study is needed to determine its overall efficacy at risk mitigation. CONCLUSIONS: Rapid establishment of an EMS-based command, control, and tracking center is possible in the setting of a public health emergency. In addition to risk mitigation, this type of center could provide syndromic surveillance in real time and provide the earliest indication of a potential threat to public health in acute and long-term care facilities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".