Osaka prefecture, an industrial and commercial center in western Japan with a population of 7.4 million, is divided into 40 municipalities. Each municipality has an independent ambulance dispatching center to provide ambulances and rescue personnel information about availability of physicians and hospital beds in that municipality's receiving hospitals. An Emergency Medical Services Information Center (EMS-IC), equipped with a wireless network and memory devices, collects information on available specialits and vacant hospital beds every three hours from 300 hospitals and clinics in the whole prefecture and supplies them to physicians, ambulances, medical institutions, fire services headquarters, police departments, ambulance dispatching centers, medical societies and the Red Cross. EMS-IC can provide the name of the most appropriate medical institution to a running ambulance on request from rescue personnel. EMS-IC also stores information on bank blood and antiserum.
