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Aladtec’s Online Employee Scheduling System Resolves Challenging EMS Staffing Issues at Burning Man

Coordinating, managing and scheduling hundreds of medical staff is easily handled with cloud-based SaaS product EMS Manager.

Reno, NV - Each year, the last Monday of August signals the start of the largest outdoor art festival in North America...Burning Man. A “city” covering seven square miles is built in the Black Rock Desert about 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada.

Thousands of volunteers and hundreds of paid support staff are responsible for making Burning Man a success. When it comes to medical support, hundreds of people are hired from various clinics, hospitals and EMS agencies around the country to be on on site for what has been referred to as “the largest planned mass casualty event in history.”

As you can imagine, scheduling and managing a medical team of this size, who have never worked together, is challenging. Humboldt General Hospital, in nearby Winnemucca, is the contractor for the massive medical and EMS requirements for Burning Man.“We provide a mobile hospital, a mobile medical unit, and a full ALS ambulance response system for the event. There are about 70,000 participants in the city for the one week festival and we provide all the medical care.We see about 3,200 patients each year at Burning Man so we staff anywhere from 300-350 temporary employees. It’s an enormous issue, dealing with how we schedule the people out there.We use EMS Manager at Humboldt General Hospital EMS and we use it to coordinate all the physicians, administrators and EMS staff at Burning Man too. EMS Manager provides online access so contract workers can place their availability right from their home many months before the event and then we manage the system from our location. Staff can also login to EMS Manager at the event to pick up more shifts due to no-shows or when people drop shifts. EMS Manager is excellent. It’s a very efficient tool for us,” explains Pat Songer, Administrative Director, Humboldt General Hospital.

About Humboldt General Hospital EMS: For over 35 years, HGH EMS Rescue has been the exclusive provider of 24-hour emergency medical services across 10,000 square miles in Humboldt County, Nevada; parts of Pershing County and Lander County, Nevada; and the lower portion of the State of Oregon. They provide EMS support services to approximately 19,000 local residents and nearly 70,000 people for one week every summer during Burning Man.

Aladtec, Inc. is a proud provider of web-based software solutions for online employee scheduling and workforce management applications. The company’s flagship products, EMS Manager and FIRE Manager, are leaders in the public safety sector. Together with their newest product, Zanager, they serve more than 1,000 EMS agencies, fire departments, police departments and other businesses. Over 60,000 employees use Aladtec’s online employee scheduling and workforce management products. Aladtec is headquartered just outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in Hudson, Wisconsin. For more information, visit www.aladtec.com.