Improving the emergency response
Emergency vehicles at the scene of an accident – an image that is unfortunately seen far too often in everyday life. The rescuers are often under enormous time pressure. The injured person or persons must be treated as quickly and as well as possible and then taken to the nearest suitable hospital, whether by ambulance or helicopter.
It is important that the destination hospital has as accurate a diagnosis as possible from the emergency doctor in order to treat the casualty or casualties correctly and promptly. A phone call from the doctor or a paramedic at the scene of the accident is helpful, but often not enough. Verbal communication can easily lead to misunderstandings. The diagnosis must then be entered into the hospital’s system (taking into account the risk of misunderstandings) – in the hope that everything has been understood correctly.
However, it is far better if the rescue team on site can enter information about the patient’s condition directly into a tablet and then send this data directly to the hospital. The data from the medical devices, such as ECG data, is collected and automatically transferred to the tablet, thus eliminating another error factor.
By combining the data from the medical devices and the emergency physician’s diagnosis, an initial, comparatively comprehensive picture of the injuries is created. This data is then sent to the hospital so that it can arrange further examinations if necessary or provide the injured person with optimum treatment. What sounds so simple is by no means trivial.
Cross-network communication
In Germany, three independent mobile network providers—Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Telefónica—provide the infrastructure for mobile communication. However, this means that even if one or even two of the networks are available, a customer of the third provider still has no network. In addition, there are still numerous dead spots in Germany, i.e. places where mobile phone reception is not possible.
It is clear that this is rarely the case in urban areas. But in rural areas, the “no network” message on cell phones is by no means an exception. However, the goal of providing the treating hospital with the injured person’s data in a timely manner cannot be achieved.
medDV has tackled this problem in cooperation with A1 Digital. Carsten Rausch, CEO of medDV, reports on the launch: “We supported the Bavarian Red Cross as a partner in the area of mobile communications. The BRK had more than 1,500 SIM cards in use and wanted to focus less on administration and more on helping people in need.” The administrative burden was simply too great.
At the same time, BRK is driving forward the digital transformation. This also includes the faster provision of – potentially life-saving – information about injured people at the scene of an accident to hospitals.
Network prioritization eliminated
“In order to ensure the highest possible coverage for the emergency services on site, it is therefore necessary to always provide several SIM cards for data transmission. This further increases the administrative burden – and it involves several thousand cards,” explains Rausch. However, the greater the investment in SIM card management, the fewer resources are available for rescue operations and other assistance.
In addition, each mobile network provider prioritizes its own network. This further increases the effort required to make optimum use of the cards. And the costs for the emergency services are rising. It was therefore necessary to find a solution that would put a stop to this growing administrative effort, not be tied to the provider’s network prioritization and, in the best case, make optimum use of the available data packages.
“Together with A1 Digital, we then looked for a solution to address these very different problem areas,” says the medDV CEO.
The result is that medDV can offer the SIM cards as a service for the emergency services. “This means we now have a card that we can use to serve several networks. This makes it much easier for the emergency services to make the data available to the hospitals,” says Rausch.
Data volume as a pool and double encryption
At the same time, this approach enables the cards of all providers to be managed uniformly. Data volumes can also be made available as a pool. “The mobile phone providers ‘actually’ provide the data volume per card. However, our approach makes it possible for us to put unused card volume from one card into a pool and make it available to another SIM card if required. This is because we can see exactly how much data volume has been used for each card.” In this way, the costs for the SIM cards can be reduced to a minimum.
However, efficient data transfer to the hospital was not the only important aspect of the project. “Safety is also very important to us,” emphasizes Rausch. medDV developed double encryption for the solution. This runs on the tablets developed by medDV itself, some of which are even equipped with two slots for SIM cards for mobile use, giving the teams more flexibility at the scene of the accident.
“On our tablets, the data is encrypted before transmission. But that’s not enough for us, so we also encrypt the data transfer itself. After all, this is particularly sensitive patient health data and therefore worthy of protection,” says Rausch, explaining this approach.
Today, medDV works with over 450 hospitals and more than 900 emergency services. This high number is partly due to the fact that many rescue services are organized regionally and the district associations in one region (can) operate independently of those in another region, even if they belong to the same organization such as the Red Cross, Malteser, Johanniter, ASB or others.
Conclusion
In collaboration with A1 Digital, medDV has developed a solution to improve the transfer of patient data from the accident site to the hospital. The solution includes a SIM card that can serve several networks and is managed uniformly. Data volumes can be made available as a pool, which saves costs. In addition, double encryption has been developed to ensure the security of sensitive health data. The solution offers more efficient help for patients in need and supports the goal of providing life-saving information more quickly.
Text taken from the original – A1 Digital
