Systematic Review of Strategies to Manage and Allocate Scarce Resources During Mass Casualty Events

The authors performed a comprehensive literature review on evidence-based practices related to scarce resource allocation. They provide a methodologically rigorous review of existing strategies, and highlight the paucity of two evidence-based approaches: 1) the development of “points of distribution” can be used to efficiently distribute medical countermeasures in the aftermath of a large scale biological event, and 2) commonly used field triage systems do not perform consistently during actual mass casualty events.