Customer Case

For the French medical emergency services, we developed an ingenious and highly visual piece of customisation to prioritise emergency calls, link them directly to an emergency doctor and/or ambulance team, and automate process handling.

In one of our blogs, we talked about contact centre heroes. This term takes on additional meaning when it comes to the people who work in an emergency services’ control centre. In other words, the people on the other side of a 999 or 112 call. In their case, the term “First Contact Resolution” (FCR) caries even more weight than in “normal” contact centres. In cases like this, it is even more important that employees have the technology and tools at their disposal with which they can make the difference, often between life and death.

Standard contact centre solutions are not sufficient here. A patient or care provider ending up in a menu of options when reporting an emergency is of course out of the question. At times like those it is crucial that you can act quickly and adequately. That an ambulance is dispatched immediately to assist the patient.

But even that is not always enough. After all, an ambulance worker is not a medical doctor. In real emergencies, it is important that the patient is transported to a hospital as soon as possible. In the Netherlands and Belgium we have the “luxury” of relatively short distances. The nearest hospital is never far away. In case of great urgency, a doctor can even be sent on site.

In France, the situation is different. The distances are much greater. The hospitals are more spread out. As a result, it takes much longer – often too long – for a patient in a critical condition to see a doctor. A solution for this was devised in which special emergency doctors are connected with first responders on the scene, in order to be able to assist remotely in an emergency. The doctor gives instructions that the ambulance crew carries out.

It used to be a complex, manual and often time-consuming process to put the right people in contact with each other when an emergency call came in. This caused delays, sometimes with disastrous consequences for the patient.

DDM Consulting built a contact centre solution around it and integrated it with patient records and the geolocation system used by the French government. The solution makes it possible to prioritise emergency calls, to link them directly to an emergency doctor and/or ambulance team, and to automate process handling. Making maximum use of the drag & drop principle, the patient, ambulance and other care providers involved can simply be 'dragged' towards each other on the screen. 

After the intervention, the system’s workflow processor automatically assigns all kinds of tasks – such as informing family, the GP or police services – to the relevant services.

Thanks to the ingenious piece of customisation that the experts at DDM Consulting developed, an incredibly complex process has suddenly become extremely visual and therefore childishly simple. The control centre team now not only has access to the identity of the caller and the urgency of the call, but also to the location of the caller and of the various ambulance teams, as well as to the patient's medical file.

This means that help can be provided at lightning speed, with even remote video assistance from an emergency doctor to the ambulance team if needed.

The solution that was created is not only lightning fast and super efficient, but also 100% reliable, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is a solution that that – for the victim – can literally mean the difference between life and death.