Melanie Reuter-Oppermann

Logistics for Emergency Medical Service systems

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems worldwide are complex systems, characterized by significant variation in service providers, care pathways, patient case-mix and quality care indicators. Analysing and improving them is therefore challenging. Since EMS systems differ between countries, it is difficult to provide generic rules and approaches for EMS planning. Nevertheless, the common goal for all service providers is to offer medical assistance to patients with serious injuries or illnesses as quickly as possible. This paper presents an overview of logistical problems arising for EMS providers, demonstrating how some of these problems are related and intertwined. For each individual planning problem, a description as well as a concise literature overview of solution approaches considered is given. A summary table classifies the literature according to the problems addressed and connects it to the proposed taxonomy.

A GIS-Based Decision Support System for Locating Primary Care Facilities

Keeping up a high level of primary care services for a whole country or even a federal state is a very challenging task due to the demographic change and many other reasons, also for Germany. In the future it is expected that even more general practitioners (GP) are necessary to cover close to come healthcare. Therefore, an efficient use of resources and an optimized planning is crucial. Mathematical models and approaches can help facing the challenge by determining optimal locations for practices, shift schedules or appointment strategies, for example. To use these in practice, decision support systems (DSS) are necessary that link the input data to the approaches and display the results. The outline of such a decision support system for optimally locating GP practices is presented in this paper.

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.

An Innovative Concept for Teaching Operations Research Applied to Health Care

This chapter presents our innovative approach to teach Industrial Engineering and Management Master students how to apply Operations Research to health care problems. We, the Chair of Discrete Optimization and Logistics (DOL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, offer the course “Operations Research in Health Care Management” where we give an introduction to the German health care system and cover a variety of Operations Research (OR) methods and their application to health care planning problems arising for example in hospitals, emergency medical services systems or for home health care providers. In our practical seminar “Health Care Management” students work in groups to solve real world problems from hospitals or other health care facilities using OR methods. During their project, they work in close collaboration with representatives from the project partners and are supervised by DOL research assistants. Additionally, students can deepen their skills in software tools by attending lectures on the IBM ILOG Optimization studio or on the simulation software AnyLogic. These skills are especially useful for our practical seminar. Finally, the seminar “Hospital Management” taught by a former hospital director gives additional insight into the hospital processes as well as regulations and best practices. The courses are supposed to increase the students’ interest in working in the health care domain. Our aim is to prepare motivated students for management positions in hospitals or other health care institutions.

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.

Dispatch of a wind farm with a battery storage

The combination of a wind farm with a battery storage allows to schedule the system in a more balanced way, alleviating natural wind power fluctuations. We present a mathematical model that optimizes the contribution margin (CM) of a system that consists of a wind farm and a lithium-ion battery storage from an operator’s perspective. We consider the system to take part in the electricity stock exchange. We discuss adaptions of the model when additional participation at the minute reserve market is possible. We construct a test instance for the model for Germany and compare the optimal solutions to two reference cases. We evaluate if the gain of an integrated wind battery system compensates the investment and operating costs for the storage and we derive target prices for the battery system.

Towards a Customer-Oriented Queuing in Service Incident Management

The provision of services hinges considerably on the contribution of the provider and the customer and—if present—on their involved networks. In this paper we focus on incident management—a service domain that is highly relevant for all kinds of industries and is described from a provider internal perspective in the ITIL documentation.