Next frontiers in emergency medical services in Germany: Identifying gaps between academia and practice

Abstract

In recent years, an increase in data availability and computation power led to the “rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”. In many different domains, AI-based methods and more specifically intelligent decision support systems (DSS) are studied in research and already implemented in practice, but not yet so in emergency medical services (EMS). This is especially true for the German EMS system that falls short in terms of digitalization in general and the use of well-grounded methods for managing and planning their logistics and processes. As the actual need for intelligent DSS in the German EMS are unclear, we have performed interviews with German EMS experts. Referring to the qualitative data, we compare the decision problems and desired DSS with existing research and identify gaps between academia and practice.