Optimizing the Quality and Delivery of City Emergency Medical Services

Fellows: Christoph Hartmann, Ritvik Kharkar, Mathew Kiang, Karen Lavi
Data Science Mentor(s): Adolfo De Unanue, Eric Potash
Project Manager: Paul van der Boor
Project Partner: City of Cincinnati

The Cincinnati Fire Department conducts more than 80,000 emergency medical responses each year, providing pre-hospital treatment and transportation to hospitals in order to reduce morbidity and mortality. In order to optimize these services, the city collects data on emergency medical services (EMS) deployment and incidents, and would like to build analytics that increase EMS efficiency, effectiveness, and long term sustainability.

To help Cincinnati meet these goals, DSSG built a system that provides appropriate, targeted emergency medical call response. We focused on three areas: ensuring that medics are strategically placed for deployment, optimizing deployment of medics so that teams aren’t sent on too many or too few runs, and appropriately maximizing the limited number of EMS personnel and resources.