Improving EMS Deployment Performance

I work regularly with agencies that are looking to improve aspects of their operations. Some casual readers may be surprised to know that the focus of those discussions is not always about cutting response times. While response is a simple and common measure, it clearly does not evaluate EMS well and certainly fails to encapsulate many of its complex needs and values. Still, I feel the necessity to address the time objective briefly before going on to other important aspects.  

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See What Others Can't

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a superpower of some kind. Little did I know that one day my wish would actually come true. 

For anyone who is a serious user of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), it is not news that this week is the 2019 Esri User Conference. If you are not one of those people, the “UC” is an annual gathering of around 20,000 people who share an interest in applying geospatial technology to solve real-world problems from optimizing business to saving the environment. I was particularly inspired by the theme this year, “See What Others Can’t.”

At its core, GIS is a spatial database for the analysis and visualization of information. When it is used in EMS, it can take a deep dive through your call history and come up with an estimation of the likelihood of the location of calls for service within the next hour. Because it can be an automated process, this forecast can be repeated every few minutes to give you a constantly updated view of the near future regarding where you are most likely to be needed. Some users of MARVLIS Demand Monitor compare it to a weather map that shows the changing conditions in your service area. But knowing where you need to be is only a part of the problem of optimizing the delivery of emergency medical services.

To really be efficient, you also need to know where you are and where you can be within your response time allocation. To answer this question, you need a model of the street network and an understanding of both the daily patterns of travel as well as the unique driving conditions right now. Many counties across the US have dedicated GIS staff to maintain these navigation and addressing models, but commercial vendors can also provide a good base layer of data. TheAddresser is another product from BCS and it can be used to measure or even improve the quality of your geographic data to improve its ability to turn an address into a proper coordinate where a crew can physically respond. The digital road network that is used to calculate a route can be improved by modeling how fast vehicles in your fleet have traveled along each road segment in the past, divided by direction, and lumped into various traffic time periods. The MARVLIS Impedance Monitor automates the mining of your Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) history to generate these unique travel times to understand exactly what area can be covered even as an ambulance is moving. For the immediate hazards along the way, MARVLIS can leverage the events logged by Waze users in real-time to enhance your own road network data through MARVLIS Central. Together, this gives you the best understanding of the reach your crews have at any given moment.

The real trick is in how you choose to post ambulances to meet your specific objectives. If a fast, safe response is most valued, ambulances can be directed to uncovered hot spots which will minimize the distance they must travel to the next call. If cutting response times across the board, or minimizing post moves is preferred, a weighting can be applied in the MARVLIS Deployment Planner to optimize the geographic coverage area. Regardless of how the criteria are balanced, an hourly, prioritized posting plan can be generated based on your service objectives. That plan can then be automated through the live connection in MARVLIS Deployment Monitor that can not only see where ambulances are located by their status, but also directly viewing where calls are currently active from the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) software. It can then even make specific recommendations on reassigning units to automatically optimize your coverage criteria.

Together, these intrinsically GIS-based tools can provide an unparalleled insight into the operational world of EMS with timely automated recommendations on how to improve service according to your community’s values. The suite of MARVLIS applications give any EMS manager a view to “see what others can’t.”  To see clarity in the everyday chaos of EMS operations, GIS can give you genuine superpowers. 

-Dale Loberger