I save the world each day at work in obvious (and not so obvious) ways. For the sake of space & time, I’ll elaborate on the “obvious” bit. I work for a company that provides near-real time (updated with new data every 5-15 minutes) information of how well paramedics, call takers, and dispatchers do their job compared to medically sound protocols. By “protocols”, I’m referring to things like the Medical Priority Dispatch System (which has peer-reviewed articles backing it up), those created by the medical director for a given ambulance system/911 call center (unfortunately, not everyone’s custom protocols are that great), and comparisons against basic expected requirements for doing a task (e.g. after sticking in a breathing tube, did the paramedics check to make sure the patient started getting oxygen?).
In addition to providing a constantly updated view, we also send e-mail/text message alerts when things look weird (e.g. lots of respiratory related problems all of a sudden) or when things aren’t doing so well (e.g. an ambulance took longer than 15 minutes to arrive).
Finally, we even deal with the allocation of dollars (or, as LW would put it, “utilions”). Bluntly put, ambulances and doctors require money and less money = less/worse services. So, when we help people get paid, we increase the number of utilions floating around for providing patient care.
I have built at least 50+ such things and am working on improving the map that is used to display the information (which affects all our triggers and alerts). Unfortunately, I don’t know of a neat easy formula for converting that to lives saved.
Since my company has customers in nearly every state in the USA (including Alaska and Hawaii) + several provinces in Canada, I guess that’s the geographic scope of my work too.
I save the world each day at work in obvious (and not so obvious) ways. For the sake of space & time, I’ll elaborate on the “obvious” bit. I work for a company that provides near-real time (updated with new data every 5-15 minutes) information of how well paramedics, call takers, and dispatchers do their job compared to medically sound protocols. By “protocols”, I’m referring to things like the Medical Priority Dispatch System (which has peer-reviewed articles backing it up), those created by the medical director for a given ambulance system/911 call center (unfortunately, not everyone’s custom protocols are that great), and comparisons against basic expected requirements for doing a task (e.g. after sticking in a breathing tube, did the paramedics check to make sure the patient started getting oxygen?).
In addition to providing a constantly updated view, we also send e-mail/text message alerts when things look weird (e.g. lots of respiratory related problems all of a sudden) or when things aren’t doing so well (e.g. an ambulance took longer than 15 minutes to arrive).
Finally, we even deal with the allocation of dollars (or, as LW would put it, “utilions”). Bluntly put, ambulances and doctors require money and less money = less/worse services. So, when we help people get paid, we increase the number of utilions floating around for providing patient care.
I have built at least 50+ such things and am working on improving the map that is used to display the information (which affects all our triggers and alerts). Unfortunately, I don’t know of a neat easy formula for converting that to lives saved.
Since my company has customers in nearly every state in the USA (including Alaska and Hawaii) + several provinces in Canada, I guess that’s the geographic scope of my work too.