Intelligent event processing for emergency medical assistance

The main objective of Emergency Medical Assistance services is to attend patients with sudden diseases at any possible location within an area of influence. Especially for severe emergency patients, the potential of such systems to reduce mortality is directly related to the response time, e.g., the time a patient has to wait for an ambulance. An efficient coordination of the ambulance fleet is crucial for reducing the response times of a service. And this requires complete, real-time information about the current state of the ambulance fleet. Such information is usually transmitted by the ambulance crew members. However, due to the often stressful work of those professionals, the information is frequently not sent in a timely manner. In this paper we present an approach that addresses this problem. We use a Complex Event Processing architecture to automatically identify and transmit incidents and changes in the operational states of ambulances. As a result, the availability of information in the control centre and, thus, the effectiveness of the service is improved. The system is inspired by the operational model of SUMMA112, the Emergency Medical Coordination Centre of the Autonomous Region of Madrid in Spain.