912Rwanda

Equitable Ambulance Services for Emergencies (EASE)

912Rwanda

Saving lives with emergency medical ambulance dispatch systems designed for low resourced settings

Kigali, Rwanda

RWA

Not registered as any organization

Every year, nearly 30 million people die from medical emergencies. At least 20% of these could be saved with efficient emergency medical response systems (EMRS) which ensure patients rapidly get to hospitals which provide lifesaving treatment. EMRS have led to huge reductions in deaths from medical emergencies in high income countries (HICs). Electronic ambulance dispatch systems are central to the efficiency of EMRS. They facilitate staff at dispatch centres to receive emergency calls, capture the location and type of the emergency, and dispatch an ambulance, and staff in ambulances to match the patient to the closest appropriate hospital. HIC electronic dispatch systems are complex, expensive, and developed for evolved, well-mapped, and well-resourced health systems; they take months or years of training to use. In low-or-middle-income-countries (LMICs), efficient EMRS are desperately needed to reduce deaths and disability after emergencies. However, the complex dispatch systems used in HICs are not suitable for LMICs where resources are scarce; emergency response staff have had minimal training; and types of emergencies, locations of patients, and hospitals matched to their emergency are unknown. Dispatch software platforms suitable for use in low-resourced settings are urgently needed.

912Rwanda is a digital platform which enables real-time coordination between emergency callers, dispatchers, ambulances, and hospitals - purpose-built for low-resource countries. Developed in Rwanda, the pilot version was deployed as the national ambulance dispatch system - it has already supported over 16,000 emergency trips. The platform includes a web-based dispatch interface and Android mobile apps designed to operate in offline or low-bandwidth settings. When a call is received, dispatchers use locally developed mapping technology and a “Community Pinˮ tool to identify the callerʼs location, even in areas without formal addresses or streets. Ambulance crews receive alerts and directions via smartphone. At the scene, patient information is entered into the app, triggering a "Destination Decision Support Algorithm (DDSA)", which recommends the optimal nearby hospital based on medical need, distance, and current facility readiness. Hospitals are notified by SMS with critical patient details and estimated arrival time. 912Rwanda was co-designed with Rwandan paramedics to ensure usability by minimally trained staff. Dashboards provide real-time data for monitoring and system improvement. Unlike imported systems, 912Rwanda is modular, cost-effective, and tailored to the realities of LMICs—closing the gap in emergency care and enabling governments to build equitable, scalable, life-saving health infrastructure.

Our software's primary users are staff of Rwanda’s public EMRS, Service d’Aide Medicale Urgente (SAMU). These frontline professionals interact directly with the platform’s web and mobile interfaces to coordinate patient response and optimize care pathways. 912Rwanda improves their operational effectiveness — reducing dispatch time, enabling GPS-based routing even without formal addresses, and supporting hospital triage. SAMU, hence 912Rwanda, serves communities living in Kigali and saves lives by ensuring people with medical emergencies quickly receive lifesaving treatment. SAMU was started in 2007 to cope with the growing burden of emergencies due to road traffic crashes (RTCs) related to motorbike transport (motos). Motos are associated with around 5000 crashes and 700 deaths each year; this burden is increasing, given the growing population in Kigali and the affordability of motos for transport. Additionally, the changing disease epidemiology means more patients with non-communicable disease-related emergencies, like heart attacks and strokes, are being transported by SAMU. This means that the proportion of RTC patients transported by SAMU has declined from 80 to 50%, whilst the numbers of ambulance journeys have increased from around 7000 to 18000 per year. In 2023-4, SAMU received nearly 25000 emergency calls and 912Rwanda was used for 60-90% of them.