Emergency services · Accra, Ghana · Operations

Sending every ambulance to the hospital it can reach

Kwame runs dispatch for the city ambulance service in Accra.

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The challenge

His crews pick a hospital by habit. When the approach road is jammed, an ambulance can sit for twenty minutes a few hundred metres from the door. Dispatchers only learn it from the radio, after the patient has waited.

How the flow works

With xMap Flows, Kwame built Beacon. Beacon is an AI employee: a flow of 7 blocks.

  1. Every fifteen minutes,

    Every 15 minutes (Schedule)

  2. at each of six emergency entrances,

    Six emergency entrances (My data)

  3. Beacon measures how the roads are moving,

    Roads at the door (Traffic Flow)

  4. ranks the hospitals clearest first,

    Clearest first (Sort and limit)

  5. updates the dispatch map,

    Dispatch screen (Show on a map)

  6. and if an approach is at a standstill,

    Road at a standstill? (Branch)

  7. warns every dispatcher at once.

    Warn dispatchers (Microsoft Teams)

What it solves

The result

Now the dispatch room keeps one live map open. When the road outside one hospital freezes, Beacon warns the team within a quarter of an hour, and the next crew goes to the clear one. The average run is nine minutes shorter.

Kwame cannot clear Accra’s roads. But his crews no longer wait in them.

15 minbetween road checks
6hospital approaches watched
9 minshorter average run

An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.

The flow, block by block

  1. 1

    Every 15 minutes

    Schedule

    Starts the flow on a timetable.

  2. 2

    Six emergency entrances

    My data

    Brings in a table you uploaded or a list you saved on the My data page: your stores, customers, target accounts or sites.

  3. 3

    Roads at the door

    Traffic Flow

    How the traffic is moving on the roads around each place, right now: the current speed and the free-flow speed in km/h, how jammed the roads are (a jam factor from 0, free, to 10, standstill), the congestion as a percentage, the level in words, how many roads were measured and closed, and the busiest road.

  4. 4

    Clearest first

    Sort and limit

    Puts the items in order, and can keep only the first ones: the 10 best rated, the 20 nearest, the highest fit scores.

  5. 5

    Dispatch screen

    Show on a map

    Shows the results as points on a map, with the area of interest.

  6. 6

    Road at a standstill?

    Branch

    Splits items in two.

  7. 7

    Warn dispatchers

    Microsoft Teams · Teams

    Runs an action in Microsoft Teams.

Templates to build it

Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.

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