Santa Monica has one of the country’s most inefficient emergent medical service (EMS) system. The national average time for an ambulance to respond to an emergency call is 7 minutes. Even in a rural setting, the average response time is 14 minutes. Santa Monica, however, based on the city data from March to November 2021, takes averagely 30 minutes from receiving the call to arrive the destination, much longer than that of the national average.
We located the problem to be its ambulance dispatch system. The traditional way to respond an EMS call is to dispatch an ambulance after the station receives a call. The problem is when the nearest station runs out of ambulances, the station needs to request an ambulance from another station further away and adds on to the wait time.
Thus, we aim to develop the app beepo to make ambulance dispatch more efficient in Santa Monica. Our purpose is to manage ambulance vehicles in all four stations citywide, predict when and where the demand of emergency calls rises, and dispatch ambulances to the nearest station when the demand rises.