In this paper, a Pre-hospital Health Emergency Management System (PHEMS) is presented, which is being developed on the basis of a common reference architecture that has been defined at a European level by partners from ten EU member states in the course of the ongoing HECTOR project. The PHEMS, which is implemented as an autonomous system, will be integrated as an added-value service into the Regional Health Telematics Network of Crete. The PHEMS architecture is based on a 'perception-cognition-action' paradigm.