Ambulance

Focus on Performance Optimization
Split-Second Deployment
Decision-Making!
By Duncan Bänffer, General Manager Finance & Controlling
and ICT at AmbulanceZorg Rotterdam-Rijnmond (AZRR)
AmbulanceZorg Rotterdam-Rijnmond (AZRR) is one of the Netherlands’ busiest ambulance services.
Serving a population in excess of 1.2 M it provides urgent and emergency medical cover to the hectic
Port of Rotterdam area as well as to remote rural areas. General Manager of Finance, Controlling and
ICT, Duncan Bänffer was given the challenge of further developing a project to improve the deployment
of front-line ambulance crews while improving response times and increasing cost-efficiencies. The start
of the project was years ago in a fact finding visit of the AZRR to see Optima Live and Optima Predict
working in action. The ability of Optima Live and Predict to provide accurate split-second deployment
information and their popularity among dispatchers made the decision on where to seek an IT-driven
solution much easier. Read on to find out what happened next…
Introduction to AZRR
In the Rotterdam metro area
“AmbulanceZorg Rotterdam-Rijnmond”
(AZRR) provides Emergency Medical
Transport and Planned Medical Transport.
AZRR is a cooperative of two contractors,
Veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond (VRR),
a public organisation, and the Bios Group,
a private company. In total nearly 400
employees are 24/7 available for medical
support for approximately 1.2 million
population of the Rotterdam metro area,
and the tens of thousands of workers in
the Port of Rotterdam and surrounding
industrial areas. South of Rotterdam there
is a more rural area, which is also serviced
and supported by AZRR with acute and
planned medical care. In 2015, AZRR
handled 107.380 deployments with 85
ambulance vehicles. During day time around
37 ambulances are on duty.
The Rotterdam-Rijnmond Dispatch Center
hosts the ambulance service, fire and police
departments. During the day, AZRR has six
medical dispatchers on duty. Three nurses
act as call-takers, one dispatcher handles
low-care ambulances and two dispatchers
take care of the Emergency Medical Care
ambulances.
First Contact with Optima
The first contact with Optima dates back
to 2009, resulting in a visit to Houston to
see Optima Predict and Optima Live in
an actual, live situation. At that moment
AZRR was looking for a system to support
the dispatch room in deploying the most
suitable ambulance, taking into account the
optimal distribution of vehicles over the area
for the next 20 minutes. The dispatchers
experienced a very high workload, and we
envisioned Optima to decrease that. The
general idea was that in hectic moments,
with many simultaneous deployments to be
handled by the dispatch room, dispatchers
were not able to cope fully with the
workload. There was not enough time for
the dispatchers to get hold of the new
locations of the vehicles before selecting the
most suitable ones and also making sure the
vehicles were distributed optimally across
the service area. The mix of rural and urban
settings complicated optimal deployments of
vehicles and was an extra hurdle to be taken
in the process. This resulted in the general
idea that the solution had to be an IT-driven
one, instead of increasing the number of
ambulances. The costs of Optima compared
to the investment and operational expenses
related to adding ambulances, makes Optima
the better economical choice. Although
there was a lot of enthusiasm for Optima in
2009, many other operational issues meant
that the decision to implement Optima was
delayed until 2011.
What is Optima?
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Optima provides software solutions
drawing on operations research to analyse
historic data and providing modelling
to support a range of strategic and
operational decisions. Optima provides two
solutions: Optima Predict and Optima Live.
Both solutions are made up of a number of
modules.
Optima is a planning software package that
statistically and dynamically determines the
optimal distribution of vehicles or posts over
a region. The Optima solution consists of
Biography:
Duncan Bänffer
Duncan Bänffer is the
General Manager Finance
& Controlling and ICT for
AmbulanceZorg Rotterdam-
Rijnmond (AZRR) in the
Netherlands. He oversees
all financial, accounting and
IT efforts of this 24/7 operational ambulance
service with 400 employees. He is also the
overall project manager for the Optima
implementation project at AZRR. He has
worked for a number of smaller and larger
companies after graduating in Business
Economics at the Erasmus University in
Rotterdam. Duncan’s specialty is leading
transition processes, supported by his
combined financial and logistical expertise.
50 Spring 2016 | Ambulancetoday