Assessing information requirements for complex decision making in healthcare

User assistance systems can help practitioners making decision for logistical problems, for example those arising in healthcare. Optimisation approaches included in such a system to determine an (optimal) solution often need to address more than one and often conflicting objectives leading to a number of alternative solutions of similar quality. The study proposed in this paper investigates how many alternative solutions should be proposed to a decision maker, which characteristics they should have, and which level of detail the presentation of solutions should have in order to enable the user in making the best decisions for the individual problem

DiGA, an Innovation Made in Germany -- Status Quo and a Perspective of Potential Users

The German health care system has to face raising costs, an increase in demand as well as a shortage of staff, making an efficient use of resources as well as the design of innovative services and digital solutions necessary. Even though the digitalization of the health care system is far behind, Germany was the first country to integrate DiGA, a special form of digital health apps, into the health care market. While this is a very promising development, it is still unclear whether patients actually know about these apps and if processes are efficient enough to promise a significant benefit to them. Therefore, we discuss the different stakeholders and performed an online survey with 262 participants from Germany to study the patients's view on DiGA. The results show that their intention to use is high, but many are not aware of the actual DiGA offered

Towards a Unified Understanding of Data-Driven Support for Emergency Medical Service Logistics

Time-critical medical emergencies challenge emergency medical service (EMS) systems worldwide every day. In order to respond to these incidents as soon as possible, EMS logistics\u27 approaches can help locating and dispatching ambulances. Many of these approaches use estimates for the demand as well as the driving, service and turnaround times. In order to determine useful solutions and make informed decisions, reliable forecasts are necessary that take the characteristics and constraints of the planning problems at different levels into account. While many different approaches have been presented and tested in literature, a common understanding is still missing. This paper therefore proposes a taxonomy on EMS forecasting that distinguishes between medical emergencies and patient transports, demand and time intervals in the response process, as well as the three planning levels strategic, tactical and operational. In addition, an illustrative example and a research agenda are presented based on the findings for the taxonomy

Chatblood - Towards designing chatbots for blood donors

Healthcare systems worldwide depend on volunteer blood donations to secure surgeries and treatments for patients. Stochastic demands and donations as well as a short shelf-life of blood products impose additional challenges. In order to adequately match demand and supply, it is crucial for blood donation centres to call in donors at the right time, reach non-donors, and motivate first-time and lapsed donors to donate regularly (again). While often websites offer information to new donors and sometimes apps provide access to appointment systems for regular donors, for example, we argue that chatbots offer an easy and anonymous access to information for all. As an addition to apps and websites they could help to reach more people to become blood donors. Applying the design science research methodology, we present design principles for blood donation chatbots. In an online survey with 213 participants, we analysed the applicability of chatbots for different use cases

Changebots - Designing Chatbots to Support Blood Donor Behaviour Change

Even though blood products cannot be produced artificially, but are important for many surgeries and treatments, less than 1 \% of the population donates blood in countries like South Africa or Ghana. Therefore, efficient and successful blood donor mobilisation and management are important. We argue that a chatbot offers easy access to information for all types of donors and can support the transition of non-, first-time or lapsed donors to regular donors. By applying the design science research methodology, we have developed a chatbot for all donor types in South Africa and Ghana. We performed two design cycles, collaborating with experts from three blood services and grounding our research on existing and derived behavioural change models. The chatbot was positively evaluated in two workshops that included focus group discussions and online surveys

How many fast-charging stations do we need along European highways?

For a successful market take-up of plug-in electric vehicles, fast-charging stations along the highway network play a significant role. This paper provides results from a first study on estimating the minimum number of fast-charging stations along the European highway network of selected countries (i.e., France, Germany, the Benelux countries, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Poland) and gives an estimate on their future profitability. The combination of a comprehensive dataset of passenger car trips in Europe and an efficient arc-coverpath-cover flow-refueling location model allows generating results for such a comprehensive transnational highway network for the first time. Besides the minimum number of required fastcharging stations which results from the applied flow-refueling location model (FRLM), an estimation of their profitability as well as some country-specific results are also identified. According to these results the operation of fast-charging stations along the highway will be attractive in 2030 because the number of customers per day and their willingness to pay for a charge is high compared to inner-city charging stations. Their location-specific workloads as well as revenues differ significantly and a careful selection of locations is decisive for their economic operation

Delivery Drones - Just a Hype? Towards Autonomous Air Mobility Services at Scale

While hype often arises around emerging technologies, delivery drones have received a significant share of attention in recent years. A variety of applications for drone networks formed, from delivering medical goods to drone-delivered pizza. Nevertheless, high expectations did not yet result in a widespread deployment of drones to improve logistic networks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with drone and aviation experts to derive a taxonomy of challenges for autonomous drone operations and gain practical insight into promising solution approaches that could transform the current hype into sound business models. Our findings comprise a multitude of operational, technical, social and legal issues that have not been identified in literature. Societal adaption and the development and interaction with AI-based systems pose a major challenge to provide autonomous air mobility services in the near future

On the Impact of the Customer Base on the Added Value through System-Oriented Service Delivery in Industrial Maintenance

Today, during service delivery, providers allocate their delivery resources such that their own delivery-dependent costs are minimal. However, during service delivery, costs arise not only for the provider, but for the customer, too. In industrial maintenance, for example, those costs arise---depending on service delivery---due to longer equipment unavailability. The concept of system-oriented service delivery aims at minimizing the total (customer and provider) delivery-dependent costs within the service system and promises a Pareto improvement over today’s practice. Hence, added value is created. However, so far, we have no understanding of the magnitude of and factors favoring high added value through system-oriented service delivery. Consequently, this work aims at filling this gap and widening knowledge on the added value through system-oriented service delivery. We present a simulation study to elaborate on the added value in dependency of the customer base constellation in an industrial maintenance illustrative scenario

Next Frontiers in Emergency Medical Services in Germany: Identifying Gaps between Academia and Practice

In recent years, an increase in data availability and computation power led to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) . In many different domains, AI-based methods and more specifically intelligent decision support systems (DSS) are studied in research and already implemented in practice, but not yet so in emergency medical services (EMS). This is especially true for the German EMS system that falls short in terms of digitization in general and the use of well-grounded methods for managing and planning their logistics and processes. As the actual need for intelligent DSS in the German EMS are unclear, we have performed interviews with German EMS experts. Referring to the qualitative data, we compare the decision problems and desired DSS with existing research and identify gaps between academia and practice