There, as at the fire department, time is a precious commodity. The clinicians at LMU Hospital have been collaborating on the development of the AI operator.
The call to arrange the transport “might not take that long, but the waiting line often takes a lot of time,” said Dr. Matthias Klein, who leads the hospital’s emergency ward and is also a professor. While nurses are waiting for the dispatcher to take the call, they can’t do much else, he said, because they must be ready when someone eventually picks up. If there is an urgent situation on the emergency ward, the nurse will have to hang up and try again later.
“It’s really a time-consuming process at the moment,” he said. “And it’s really an important moment right now with technology and medicine. Medicine is often at the forefront of technology, but AI is really coming in a lot of ways right now.”
He said the AI operator at the Munich fire department has the potential to help open hospital beds more quickly.
“We have the patient ready (to leave the hospital), we did everything that’s necessary medically, but then we have this obstacle—the transport,” he said. “That starts with ordering the transport, which already takes some time, and then we often have to wait for the pickup. And that can take several hours. And if it stretches into the evening, we might have to cancel because we don’t want the patient to arrive at the final destination at 1 a.m.”
Klein said that from the hospital’s perspective, it will save nurses’ time that can better be devoted to patient care. He hopes it will eventually help improve the efficiency of the transport system, to open hospital beds more quickly by cutting wait times.
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