Towards an IT-Based Coordination Platform for the German Emergency Medical Service System

The German healthcare service system is facing a number of challenges in the years to come, prominent among these a decreasing number of hospitals and practices dealing with an increasing number of treatments and patient transportation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the idea of building a decision support tool to improve scheduling of patient transportation in the German Emergency Medical Service (EMS) system to reduce waiting times and costs, as well as increasing reliability. We outline a service platform on which the decision support tool could be realized and integrated with existing systems in EMS coordination centers. The paper thus introduces a promising approach for one of the main challenges of the German EMS system and builds the basis for further research on transport scheduling and healthcare services.