For Emergency Responders

Transforming

emergency

care

For Emergency Responders 

There’s a lot at stake in emergency care coordination. When potentially saving a life, any technology that can shave off a few seconds or help the provider come to a more informed diagnosis is vital to put into place. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel and hospital emergency department physicians use health information exchange (HIE) to find medication allergies, previous treatments or conditions, and other pertinent clinical data, such as recent test results or evidence of “doctor shopping.”

Using the HIE in Pre-Hospital Settings

Emergency service personnel are turning to HIE services to assist when caring for a patient at the emergency site or during transport. Specifically, HIE can be used to:

  • Query for patient information at dispatch/911 when the call comes in
  • Pull up the patient record in route - view accurate real-time information vs. relying on the patient or family for important details
  • Access patient problem lists and head off potential medication interactions
  • Transmit data to the hospital in route – avoids paper “chart chests” and vital information not being incorporated into the patient record

Using the HIE Post-Hospital

For EMS personnel, quality improvement does not stop after the transport is complete. Post-hospital evaluation, training and quality reporting is a vital part of emergency services. EMS personnel can use HIE to query hospital data for outcome results for quality improvement training, reporting and filling in any gaps needed for billing.

Types of CORHIO Health Information Exchange for Emergency Services

  • PatientCare 360® web portal - data from hospitals and labs is available via query
  • Results integrated into electronic health record 
  • EMS InBox - enhance reimbursement and collection activities with real-time hospital facesheets
  • Direct messaging - secure, HIPAA-compliant email for provider-to-provider communications

For details on data available in the CORHIO network by sender, click here.

Watch Webinar on CORHIO Health Information Exchange 

What our participants are saying...

"In the pre-hospital world, every time you want follow up, you have to talk to a coordinator, ask them to research and send everything that happened with patient X. With CORHIO, it's instant -- you go in and see the details right away. Now that we have CORHIO, we follow up all the time -- it allows us to make more subtle changes in the way our department runs emergency calls."

Rick Lewis
EMS Bureau Chief
South Metro Fire Department