B.C. Ambulance Electronic Patient Records

I recently blogged about the future of epcr (electronic patient records).   (old post)

Since that time I have become aware that the B.C. Ambulance service actually does epcr.
See the news release here; BCAS News Release

Car Fires, Batteries, Hybrid vehicles, etc.

I was doing a little bit of reading recently and came across some research recently done by the NFPA regarding car fires.  How many times have you gone to a car fire and not immediately chocked the tires of the burning/incapacited vehicle?  (Hopefully none).  Anyway, after reading this research on hybrid vehicles, you may want to make chocking the tires the first thing you do at every scene - fire or mvi.

Here are the current links to the NFPA research;
Part1, Part2, Part3, Part 4
Part5

If you have attention deficit disorder or otherwise find reading 20+ megs of research papers a bit boring you may want to just find the key points like I did;
Read Part1 and compare the Current Vehicle ICE Fire Tactics on page 18 to the Current EDV Fire Tactics on page 20.

The NFPA Hybrid Vehicle extraction guide is shown in this video;  http://youtu.be/CtgaLTeoH-4

Vehicle Patient Extraction Training Aid

In our neck of the woods, motor vehicle accidents in the winter on our  mountain roads are a regular occurrence during snowfalls.   In fact, just as I was about to create this blog post, the tone went off, and we had a callout to a three vehicle mvi.   A patient from one of the vehicles needed to be extracted with the jaws of life.

Anyway, I came across a training aid that would be beneficial for any department who has to respond to a lot of mvi's.  It is called the Sweet Extraction Training System from S&S Medical products.  You can read all about on their website here.

Check out this video of the product; http://youtu.be/3eNot5J-DFA

Rescues of the week

You never know when all that vertical rope rescue practice you have been doing may be needed. 

Some bridge repairs and a car accident resulted in a trained vertical rope rescue firefighter having to do a pickoff in order to save a person.  Check out this video for details; Firefighter saves life with rope rescue



A large fire also trapped a crane operator.  A helicopter had to rescue the man.

Volunteer firefighter orientation videos everybody should watch.

I spend a lot of time scouring the net trying to find various firefighter training aids such as videos.  I came across a few over the years which I think are pretty good.

Chief Rick Lasky  has a well produced video on what it means to be a firefighter.  A good video to watch to remind you of why you do what you do.  Welcome to the Fire Service (youtube)

The Chicago Fire Department has a video reinforcing "Everyone goes Home" and safety is paramount.
Everyone goes Home (youtube)

A short video from Ted Talks by a volunteer firefighter; Life Lesson

Electronic First Responder Incident Reports via the IPAD

I recently have been thinking about how much more efficient it would be to utilize the ipad for entering first responder incident information.  Just think, you wouldn't need to fumble with a clipboard, try to find a pen/pencil, etc - all you need to do is grab the ipad and go.

So, first off, I was thinking that I would just need to convert the form into a fillable pdf for the ipad.  Of course I could add some smarts into the form and make entry a breeze.  Here is a copy of the pdf; first responder report.  Maybe even have dispatch prefill some of the form out beforehand.  It seems lots of EMS departments use ipads in some form or another.  San Diego Frequent EMS

Here is my vision.  The ipad electronic form replaces the clipboard form.  Dispatch prefills part of the form before we even start the truck up.  The rest of the form is easy to fill and when done it wirelessly prints on either our truck printer or Ambulance printer and emails the copy to the destination hospital if needed.   This whole concept is known as ePCR (Electronic Patient Care Record). 

I, of course had dreams of creating the first ipad app that does this sort of thing, and revolutionize the industry.  A quick google of "epcr future" dashed those dreams when this video showed up;
Command IPad PCR

This guy is on board with the technology - check out this short video on a Ipad App - Ambupad

If you are interested in more information check this out at; http://www.webmedicpro.com/epcr-software/index.html.

Now if you want to see exactly how easy an electronic patient care record computer system is to use you can watch this hilarious video demonstration;  http://youtu.be/W73w8L9zijY

Some research on Incident Command Software for IPADs.

I have always been scanning magazines, the internet and the app store for various types of incident command software for firefighting.   I have come across a few and tried out a couple of the free versions during some practices.  I think the idea behind this kind of software is great, but I would really like to see it in action.  So much goes on around a commander during an incident I don't know if they could handle operating the ipad and command at the same time - unless they are a tech whiz.    I recently read an article how some fire departments in California actually assign a assistant to the commander to handle such things such as operating the ipad.

Here are some Incident Command apps I have come across;

TC Trainer :  I tried this app briefly and it looks very promising.  It has checklists and records
                      the events, among other features.  The initial setup looks pretty easy.  I only
                      tried the free version, otherwise $39.99.  You can watch this short video
                      to see how it works;  TC Trainer Creating an Incident

TC Enterprise:  This is the same basically as TC Trainer but imagine it being linked up to
                       dispatch and the FDMSoftware!  Imagine, getting a dispatch right to the IPAD
                       that is sitting in the command vehicle showing exactly where on a map we are
                       going.

IPAR App :   This was the first app I ever tried out. I only tried the free version. Seems like
                      a basic app that is based on objectives, assignments and resources for a given
                      incident.  I am not sure how often they update this app.  You can view the
                      user manual here. 

FDMSoftware:  This software doesn't look like it will be ipad ready anytime soon. link

ESRI:  ESRI is making some great strides with some online apps but they would require a bit
            of tweaking for an effective incident command system.  Interested?

There are a more cloud based alternatives out there but I haven't reviewed them.
A very good reference site that lists all kinds of fire related apps is at; http://www.firehouse.com/apps