Today was the final planning meeting for the first annual golf outing of the Housatonic Habitat for Humanity. The meeting finished at 1 p.m. and there were two choices: head back home and work on some board meeting preparations and committed writing projects or take the long way home on the Fatboy. The blue sky and 75 degree temperature made this an easy choice. The meeting was in Stony Hill, Connecticut on Route 6, just off of Interstate 84. I headed east on Route 6 and merged onto route 25 and then headed south to Bridgeport. According to Microsoft MapPoint, the 24 mile trip should take thirty-five minutes. That would be true if there were no trucks, traffic lights, construction, nor congestion. On a Friday afternoon or in bad weather, the trip can easily take double what the mapping programs suggest.
For a Friday afternoon motorcycle ride, it really doesn’t matter how long it takes, but if you happen to be in an ambulance on the way from Danbury Hospital to the hospital in Bridgeport, the travel time can be a matter of life or death. The State of Connecticut regulates which hospital is able to perform which procedures. On the surface this appears to be a very political and financial process, as opposed to a quality of care process like most people expect. If you have a heart attack in the western part of Fairfield County, an ambulance will take you to Danbury hospital. The outstanding emergency department team would apply numerous techniques to bring you back to normal. An attending cardiologist would utilize some of the latest drugs known to be effective for certain heart conditions. However, if the treatments are not adequate and it is determined that you need angioplasty, you would then be put back in an ambulance to make the trip to Bridgeport.
There is a lot more to the story about what hospital can do what, and you can be assured that the Danbury Hospital team is doing everything humanly possible (including a web petition) to gain the "certificate of need" from the State to be able to perform angioplasty and a full range of cardiac surgery.
There are other questions posed by the saga above. Whatis the best way to get from Danbury to Bridgeport? It depends on a lot of factors. The simplest GPS devices provide an arrow which points directly to the destination. More sophisticated GPS devices provide specific turning commands and exact routing. Neither of these is optimum. In particular, if you were in an ambulance, what would be really valuable would be to know what is the quickest way to get to the hospital — given all the traffic conditions at the moment. In the future there will be a network of sensors populating most state and interstate roads. Just like E-ZPass and Mobil SpeedPass pick up your signal as you drive through a toll booth or into a Mobil gas station, the network of sensors will also recognize cars as they pass by. The idea is not to identify specific vehicles — plenty of privacy protections will be built in — but rather to identify how many vehicles are moving, where they are moving, and how fast they are moving. Central servers will then be able to monitor traffic and provide GPS receivers in vehicles with an optimized up-to-the-minute routing to get where you are going in the least possible amount of time.
As for the Danbury area, the optimum routing for a heart attack patient will hopefully be straight to Danbury Hospital where they will be able to perform whatever method of care is best.

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