It is not uncommon for ambulances to be turned away from hospitals and their emergency departments due to the hospital being at or almost at full capacity. This is called ambulance diversion. Some of the contributions to ambulance diversion include a shortage of beds, a small emergency room, lack of available hospital staff, and not enough supplies. Ambulance diversion can be potentially fatal for the person being transported. Most of the time, the longer a person is in an ambulance, the more dangerous the situation becomes. Using the greater Chicago area as a setting, this ongoing project will develop a tool to predict the hospital bed availability in a given area and graphically depict the results. This way, the user will be able to tell where they should drive to avoid the ambulance diversion.
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