Abstract— This paper presents solutions to increase efficiency and reduce response times at an Emergency Call Center in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul. Utilizing macro-ergonomic design [1], personal staff interviews and questionnaires served to illuminate the major shortcomings of the call center’s operating system. Solutions are proposed to the two identified critical issues with the system. To address the high volume of prank calls, a multi-faceted warning campaign targeted at school-age children is proposed. To address the high workload of the medic, a detailed task analysis is created and follow-up proposed task reallocation strategies are modeled through an Arena simulation. I. INTRODUCTION he Brazilian federal government provides universal health care under the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) program, passed into constitutional law in 1988 [3]. SUS laid the groundwork for the entire gratis medical network available throughout Brazil. It wasn’t until 1995, however, that the emergency response system The Serviço de Atendimento Móvel de Urgência (SAMU) was established. SAMU is a 24-hour, government funded service that provides emergency response care to the Brazilian public through the telephone number 192 [2]. Modeled after a French health care construct of the same name, SAMU is characterized by screening all calls through a medical professional before dispatching any sort of aid [3]. The Metropolitan-Porto Alegre (Metro-POA) branch of SAMU tends to 30 cities, covering 2.5 million inhabitants. The call center has an on-call staff of 10 operators, 2 medics and 2 radio dispatchers handling the five thousand daily calls Manuscript received April 6, 2009. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0623573, by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), and by Brazil’s Coordenação de Pessoal de Ensino de Nível Superior (CAPES). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and don’t necessarily reflect the views of NSF, FIPSE, or CAPES. G. Borges, C. McGowan, and K. Meehan are fourth year Systems and Information Engineering (SIE) students at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA (emails:gab7e@ virginia.edu, cmm6be@virginia.edu, kmm8q@virginia.edu). A. Bieger , S. Kranz and L. Mancuso is a fourth year Production Engineering students at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS 90040-060 Brazil(emails: andreibieger@gmail.com, Sigrid.kranz@gmail.com, lgcmancuso@gmail.com) S. Guerlain is an associate professor of SIE at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA (e-mail: guerlain@virginia.edu). L. Guimarães is a collaborative professor of Production Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS 90040-060 Brazil (e-mail: lia@producao.ufrgs.br). that flood the Metro-POA SAMU. As SAMU develops into a service custom-fitted to the Brazilian people, it has to do so while overcoming typical public service challenges. Limited funding and resources make it difficult to provide enough training to new employees and financially motivate experienced employees to remain with the organization. These strains make it imperative that the Metro-POA SAMU call center operates as efficiently as possible while staying within its current budget, to minimize the loss of life during an emergency response. To address the most time-sensitive cases as quickly as possible, the tasks of SAMU employees must be streamlined. An employee must be free from any controllable distraction, as well as free to complete the responsibilities that require his unique level of expertise. This paper describes an investigation into the operations of the SAMU call center, analyzing the tasks of employees and developing proposals to improve the speed and quality of service offered by SAMU. Preliminary personal interviews were conducted and recorded with call-center staff of each type (operators, medics, and dispatchers) in an effort to understand each employee’s background/related work experience, job requirements, and personal concerns. Interview responses were used to develop focused questionnaires to expose the underlying issues associated with the current operations of the call center from the separate viewpoints of operators, medics and radio dispatchers. The two most pressing concerns, which had the greatest capacity for positive change, were the high volume of prank calls (approximately 65% of all calls) and the heavy workload of the medic. A campaign warning of the potential negative affects of prank calling using posters, bumper stickers, and comic strips was developed. The focus group for this campaign is Brazilian school-age children, the largest population of prank callers. In addition, a comprehensive task analysis was built to analyze the workload distribution in the current system. Several models with different distribution loads were created to determine the best solution for reducing the medic’s workload and increasing the efficiency of operations. Increasing the Efficiency of a Brazilian Emergency Response Call Center Andrei Bieger, Gabriel Borges, Sigrid Kranz, Connor McGowan, Kevin Meehan, Luiz Gabriel Mancuso, Stephanie Guerlain, IEEE Senior Member and Lia Buarque de Macedo Guimarães T Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, April 24, 2009 FPM1HF.Health.3 1-4244-4532-5/©2009 IEEE 125