Sending every ambulance to the hospital it can reach

Kwame runs dispatch for the city ambulance service in Accra. 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. With xMap Flows, Kwame built Beacon. Every fifteen minutes, at each of six emergency entrances, Beacon measures how the roads are moving, ranks the hospitals clearest first, updates the dispatch map, and if an approach is at a standstill, warns every dispatcher at once. 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.

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