Success Story:
A-TEC Ambulance
Ambulance and Medivan company creates safe driving habits with GPS Insight solutions.
Company:
A-TEC Ambulance
Industry:
Emergency Medical and Ambulance Service
Location:
Chicago, IL
Website:
www.atecambulance.com
“There’s overall a safer sense of driving with Driveri.”
“There’s no other system that incorporates all of the things that I’ve seen that your system does.”
Jim Kvidera
Operations Supervisor, A-TEC Ambulance
Dramatic reduction in driver violations
Able to defend drivers against false claims
- Created a culture of coaching and safe habits
Company
A-TEC Ambulance, Inc. is a private Chicago ambulance company that services ten major hospitals and over 100 nursing homes in the Chicagoland area. Founded in the late 90s, A-TEC has 35 vehicles on the road daily between non-emergency and emergency ambulance services and transportation.
Challenge
As a private ambulance service that transports and cares for patients, good behavior is imperative to the job – not just for paramedics, but for drivers too.
A-Tec Ambulance needed a way to monitor their drivers in case of roadway accidents and false claims, and they also needed to curb any bad driving habits picked up during the job. Without monitoring, the company was forced to navigate he said/she said scenarios in the case of accidents, alongside police reports.
“We wanted to know in real time what actually happened with some of these accidents,” said Jim Kvidera, Operations Supervisor. “We have the crew’s version, the other driver’s version, and the police report, and putting all those together – we were lacking something. What happened here? How fast were they going? What were the conditions? Did they accelerate hard? Break hard? What were they doing? Were they distracted? We had the damage on the vehicles, but we didn’t have the true story about what exactly transpired.”
Being blind to this information would ultimately increase costs for driver coachings, vehicle damages, and insurance rates. GPS Insight was able to address these challenges and more with Driveri dash cams.
Solution
After installing Driveri dash cams with GPS Insight, Jim saw an overall dramatic reduction in driver violations, and he was able to properly defend a driver from a false claim.
“Some of the videos we’ve seen are absolutely incredible,” Jim said. “You can see in detail what happened. It gives you how fast they were going, what the speed was, what the time was, the breaking, the acceleration.”
Although driving an ambulance seems like it would be chaotic, Jim said the Driveri dash cam contributed to a better environment in which the driver was more awake, aware, and alert for a smoother transportation job.
“There’s overall a safer sense of driving with Driveri,” Jim said.
The Driveri dash cam detects and notifies fleet managers about accidents, as well as potential accidents. Other features of the Driveri include detection and alerts for:
- Distracted driving
- Unsafe behaviors
- Hard breaking
- Traffic violations
- Stop sign violations
- Hard turning
- Hard acceleration
- Stop sign streak
“There’s no other system that incorporates all of the things that I’ve seen that your system does,” Jim said.
For Jim and the A-Tec Ambulance team, the GPS Insight Driveri dash cam is not just a mounted camera, but it’s also an important coaching tool. As driver alerts are accumulated, they contribute to a personalized coaching plan for drivers.
In addition to coachable driving alerts, the dash cam notifies and issues alerts for safe driving, with notifications including:
- Safe driving
- Proactive driving
- Cut off by another vehicle
This whole system tool allowed A-Tec managers to monitor, teach, and cultivate their drivers while building positive driving habits. A-Tec was able to go beyond visibility and could correct driver behavior by teaching their drivers how to be better.
“We had one incident last week where a Medi-van was in a snowstorm and went into a ditch,” Jim said. “We could see what happened, so we were able to see the driving behaviors of the driver. This was probably his first time driving in a snowstorm. Being a younger driver, he can also learn from this and benefit from it.”
Overall, A-Tec Ambulance saw a decrease in roadway accidents, even with an increase in vehicles to their fleet.
Additionally, A-Tec Ambulance drivers recorded a dramatic decrease in distracted driving incidents, as well as a decrease in failing to use seatbelts. On top of that, vaping and smoking decreased to 0%, completely disappearing from driver usage after the implementation of the dash cams.
A reward system for drivers
Thanks to the positive reinforcement programmed into the Driveri alert system, Jim was able to develop an incentive plan to reward his drivers. This driver reward system would recognize safe drivers and incentivize them to follow the coaching plan curated by the Driveri system.
“I want to develop this system into an award system so we can say, ‘These are our safest drivers we had for the company for the last year, and I want to reward these drivers for doing a good job,’ And encourage it,” Jim said.
