Towards Designing an Assistant for Semi-Automatic EMS Dispatching

Many Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems worldwide handle emergency rescues as well as patient transports and dispatchers need to assign ambulances to incidents manually throughout the day. The management of the complex system together with the manual assignments can easily create stress for and pressure on the dispatchers. Mathematical algorithms can help improving the dispatching quality, but then dispatchers still need to choose the best-fitting algorithm and furthermore, trust the algorithm’s dispatching suggestion. We propose an assistant that can support the EMS dispatchers. The assistant offers explanations for the choice of the algorithm as well as the dispatching suggestion in order to increase the dispatchers’ trust and decrease their stress. We ground the assistant’s design in Information Systems as well as Operations Research literature and thus, show how interdisciplinary service research can contribute in designing artefacts for complex service systems to solve real-world problems.