Notes

Part C - Case Study: Patient Transport Service

Each year the Patient Transport Service (PTS) of Turin Italy, transports thousands of patients to and from medical appointments by ambulance. This service is called as secondary ambulance transport to distinguish it from emergency response. The trips can be between the patient’s home and a healthcare facility or from facility to facility. Mr. Joseph Alex is the operations manager, who is handling PTS for more than 10 years. Joseph got the support of two planners: Susan, Johnny and the system analyst Allen.

Currently, PTS is using an on-premise patient tracking system, where scheduling is generally managed by Susan and it is a complex challenge requiring excellent logistics skills. If Susan inaccurately enter the travel times, PTS cannot provide quality patient service. Additionally, too many ambulances tied up in secondary transport can inhibit the emergency responses. The system will track the patient location and notify the ambulance driver by providing the details of patient’s current location and drop-off location in the appropriate time. Much harder part is estimating the time it takes to get patients in and out of the ambulance. Johnny must consider the patient’s condition, age and weight, what floor the patient is on and must be delivered to, the necessity of IV fluids or oxygen, whether the patient needs a stretcher or wheelchair, and much more. After collecting these details, Johnny will handover to Susan to enter the information to the system.



PTS decided to upgrade ambulance scheduling services (The planning system). To make this happen, Joseph has decided to conduct a meeting with the Susan, Johnny and Allen. To improve the services, Allen suggested an expert planning system that uses predictive analytics to analyse records of 500,000 prior ambulance trips and predict the transport times with 97% accuracy, far more precisely than before. Allen also suggested a planning interface that connects with prior-trip database of PTS and healthcare system of Turin Province to predict the time to get patients in and out of the ambulance and assesses variables about patient demographics, medical conditions, home and medical facility infrastructure, the impact of needed patient support and auto update the planning system. Additionally, there is support of Google Maps services that adds the ability to estimate on-the-road travel time. As a result, through the new planning system PTS can better serve the patients and the community.

Everybody likes Allen’s’ suggestion and decides to proceed with the project. Susan suggested your organization for developing this project and your organization is hired to advise PTS about software development and installation process. Now you are asked to answer the following questions.