GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — When your life hangs in the balance and you need medical attention, seconds matter.
With the ever-changing landscape of West Michigan, getting around can get difficult quickly. Life EMS Ambulance has technology that they say is helping to reduce response times.
“Those dots behind us represent, not a storm, but emergency calls that are about to happen. So we place our vehicles around those areas for the highest demand at that time,” said Life EMS Ambulance Control Center Director Ty Wiseman.
Essentially, it’s a heat map based off data to show where the next call for help will come from.
Life EMS Ambulance utilizes data from a 20-week stretch of calls from last year, the current year and an algorithm to create the map.
“Response time performance is very important to us, in order for us to get a crew to your home as quickly as possible we use that technology so that we can get there in a short amount of time. It allows us to make on the fly live decisions routing or closest vehicle at that time,” Wiseman said.
It’s particularly helpful given how much ground Life EMS covers. The company services nine counties and roughly 4,000 square miles.
While 24 Hour News 8 was at the dispatch center, a crash was called in at Plainfield Avenue and 4 Mile Road. When the operator laid the predictive heat map over the area, it was highlighted as likely to receive a call.
“As it developed it became very scary how accurate it was. So (dispatchers) learned to trust that technology and use it and so now they use it as a tool. It’s not the end-all be-all, we still require that you have to have some human component to think and process,” said Wiseman.
Life EMS says since getting this technology nearly a decade ago, they have seen their response times improve by many seconds.
“If you are doing CPR on a patient, seconds count and in a cardiac arrest situation the faster we can get there the better it is for the patient outcome,” Wiseman said.