Arriving on Time and High Operational Costs
Arriving at the scene of an emergency or the prompt pick up of a patient for treatment is critical to the success of your business. Unlike other service industries, your level of service can literally mean the difference between life and death. Making sure you arrive as a first responder or on time for an elderly patient isn’t always as easy as turning on the siren.
If your emergency crew is scattered across a large geographical area, it can be a complicated task to send the closet vehicle to the scene or patient pick up location. Not only that, you must ensure you’re sending the right type of vehicle to the scene based on the situation. Even then, finding the quickest route to a location isn’t easy with traffic, detours and construction.
While your dispatcher is responsible for providing the best information at the time, what happens if that information suddenly changes? With the urban sprawl of many metropolitan cities, what was once a field can turn into a new subdivision seemingly overnight.
Patient care is the most important aspect of your business. But like any business, you need to provide the best possible service to retain and win new business and contracts. The substantial overhead costs of outfitting each of your emergency vehicles with the necessary supplies and employing experienced and trained EMS professionals can add enormous expenses to your business.
Fleet tracking technology can help you provide the best patient care possible while reducing your overhead costs, including fuel, maintenance and insurance. More importantly, it can help you dispatch the closest vehicle to an emergency situation or patient location, saving you valuable time. Before we look at the technology behind fleet tracking, let’s look at some of the reasons EMS companies are implementing fleet tracking solutions to manage their fleet operations
Fleet tracking technology can help you provide the best patient care possible while reducing your overhead costs, including fuel, maintenance and insurance.
Everyday Business Challenges
While you are working to provide the best patient care possible despite overcrowding and employee issues, you are still running a business that presents daily challenges. Like every other service business, you have to balance your overhead expenses while increasing your bottom line. Let’s look at overhead costs first.
Your emergency response vehicles house a number of essential supplies for emergencies. When something goes into an emergency response vehicle, it becomes a specialty item and you can see an enormous markup on your supplies. These high costs are difficult to absorb and can make it difficult to improve your business’s bottom line.
As you look to save money and resources, running an efficient fleet is a top priority. Whether you have a fleet of five or five hundred, finding the closest vehicle to an emergency can be difficult and time-consuming. Your patients don’t have that time. If you cover a large metropolitan or rural area, finding a vehicle that can respond the quickest can be like finding a needle in a haystack.
This challenge also impacts another—arriving quickly to a scene. By the time the 911 call comes in and you’ve dispatched a vehicle, precious minutes have already ticked away. It’s the most critical and important part of your business and it affects a patient’s outcome. How long does it take you to plan the quickest route after the emergency call comes in?
How do you make sure the information you give your drivers is valid and up-to-date? What if you have to deliver updates while the vehicle is en-route? Getting that information to your drivers safely while in transit is a top priority.
Finally, superior customer service is your ultimate goal. You’re in the EMS business to help people. At the same time, exceeding patients’, hospitals’ and other agencies’ expectations means keeping existing business and winning new contracts. Do you have the tools in place to provide the highest levels of customer service?
These everyday challenges just scratch the surface of what it takes to run an emergency medical service company. Additional expenses such as fuel, insurance and vehicle maintenance costs, and driver liability claims add more complications. But there is a solution to address these issues and more – fleet tracking technology.
How do you make sure the information you give your drivers is valid and up-to-date? What if you have to deliver updates while the vehicle is en-route? Getting that information to your drivers safely while in transit is a top priority.
How a Fleet Tracking Solution Can Benefit Your EMS Business
Fleet tracking technology helps you address all the issues mentioned above and more. GPS fleet management solutions can help you optimize your fleet operations—which is a large part of any EMS organization’s success. By being able to monitor your fleet, you can positively impact productivity and measure areas of your fleet where operations need to improve.
One EMS company was able to reduce its fuel costs by 20 percent fleet-wide. What would that kind of savings mean to you? Installing a GPS fleet management solution can reduce and control other costs as well. As they say, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Fleet tracking solutions give you the tools to monitor vehicle maintenance schedules, cutting down on unnecessary wear and tear and prolonging a vehicle’s life.
Additionally, many companies that implement a GPS fleet management solution receive a substantial discount on their insurance premiums. One EMS company’s fleet tracking solution paid for itself three times over in the first year because their insurance company cut their insurance premiums. Moreover, fleet tracking technology gives you the data to fight false claims, which lowers your overall liability.
A key benefit for all EMS companies using a fleet management solution is the ability to dispatch the closest vehicle to an emergency or patient location. You can easily pinpoint the closest vehicle on a real-time map and quickly reroute them. With dispatching functionality, you can also provide the driver with voice-guided turn-by-turn directions through a personal navigation device, such as Garmin®.
The success of your company hinges on being able to respond quickly to a situation – whether it’s a routine call or a natural disaster. An EMS company responding to calls following the tornados that ravaged Birmingham and Tuscaloosa was able to navigate its team to provide life-saving care. Its GPS fleet management solution was able to help guide them to victims even when all landmarks, road signs and points of reference had been decimated.
Dispatching functionality also gives you the means to communicate more effectively with your team. A dispatching application integrated with in-vehicle Garmin devices allows you to quickly send information to a driver without having to get on the radio. The driver can immediately accept a call and the office is notified when the call is complete – increasing fleet productivity by up to 35 percent.
All of these benefits add up to the most important aspect of your business – superior customer service. By providing accurate ETAs to non-emergency patient pickups or rerouting a driver in transit, you increase your customer service levels. Excellent patient care and customer service to hospitals will help you maintain contracts and win new business.
These are just some of the benefits a fleet tracking solution can provide to your organization. Automating your business processes gives you the ability to address the issues mentioned in this paper much more efficiently. You can validate service calls, report on fleet operations and improve productivity while driving down costs. Now that we have discussed the benefits of fleet tracking technology, let’s look at the NexTraq™ Fleet Tracking platform.
Fleet tracking solutions give you the tools to monitor vehicle maintenance schedules, cutting down on unnecessary wear and tear and prolonging a vehicle’s life.
The NexTraq Fleet Tracking Platform – The Value Leader
The NexTraq Fleet Tracking platform and its applications – Fleet Dispatch, Fleet Metrics and Fleet Mobile can help your EMS business achieve everything discussed in this paper and more. With the 100 percent web-based you can access data in the office or while you are out in the field with your smartphone
Track and monitor your fleet to increase productivity while creating reports to understand where your fleet operations can improve and to run a more efficient organization. Use our Fleet Dispatch application to lower costs and improve driver communication. Create alerts, such as the Speed Alert, and get instant notifications via email. Drill down into your fleet’s performance with Fleet Metrics and identify areas that you can improve.