Medical Emergency Service, Czech Republic

Customer
Emergency medical service of the City of Prague is the oldest organisation of its type in Europe. The main aim of the organisation is to provide professional emergency care to citizens and visitors of Prague whose medical condition os threatening their life before they are taken care of in the hospital. The service owns up to a hundred of ambulances and medical vehicles.

The Need
The existing system of monitoring and dispatcher management of vehicles was old-fashioned, did not provide overview of individual emergency interventions and parametres of the vehicles. It was not possible to navigate drivers to destination, which is so important in order to speed up the medical intervention. There as also the need to monitor when the drivers use the hooter and when not. 

One of the main tasks for the system was clear monitoring of drive times to destination, so called  „incident management“. Legislation on the Czech Republic sets the time limit out to 15 minutes.

At present, the emergency service operates with two types of mobile forces: emergency medical help (EMH - personal vehicles with a doctor) and emergency medical rescue (EMR - large ambulance vehicles with a paramedic and a driver - rescue person). The Prague emergency service usually works on a „rendez-vous" system, in which EMR ambulances attend to the patient, and if necessary, a doctor EMH arrives later.  It is the time between the emergency call and the arrival of the emergency unit that is interesting from both legislation's and patient's point of view.

Solution
The emergency service operates wihin minutes, so the project focused on speeding up the data processing - fresh information come in every 10 seconds, rather than every usual 4 minutes. In the emergency vehicle, there is a special color display on the mobile unit of the driver, on which the driver sees the position of his emergency vehicle on the map, route to destination, description of emergency intervention, a push-button for change of status of the emergency vehicle (take-off, arrival to destination, takeoff with patient, arrival to the hospital, etc.). The emergency crew also have an emergency push-button on the display, which the driver can use in case of a physical attack or another critical situation.  Operation dispatchers work with a digital map, which displays where and when there is an emergency vehicle driving with the hooter on.

Result
Optimalisation of mobile communication shortens the time needed to drive to the patient and the work of the whole emergency service is better planned.

The yTrack system, which was created in cooperation with KTTP, provided the dispatchers, administrators and users in cars with a reliable data exchange and navigation system, which saves time in the dense Prague traffic.

• The system brought reliable information for control of time limits in arriving to patients, as required by the legislation.  It is also a very transparent tool in conflicts with third parties related to arrival times, using hooters, or in proving the location of a particular vehicle in time, etc. The system enables finding out real location of vehicles and asseses readiness to accept another task of an unlimited number of crews, all in real time (with a 10 second updating interval). A systematic analysis of data ex post also reveals whether equipment and vehicles in operation are appropriate to given conditions.
• The system specifies and speeds up the communication between dispatchers and individual vehicles, because it accepts and processes a data sentence from the Profia system with a definition of a new intervention. Information from the sentence is transmitted, not later than in 30 seconds, into the mobile unit in the vehicle via the GPRS network. Users - administrators can thus precisely identify current and past operation statuses (different steps of the intervention), look for reserves and control the operation effectiveness of the vehicles.