COVID-19, the tragic rise in substance abuse-related deaths, and the new ET3 model from CMS have collectively heightened interest in Mobile Medical (Fire & EMS) information exchange. To answer this call for interoperability, Beyond Lucid Technologies (www.BeyondLucid.com), an award-winning health-and-safety innovations firm serving all levels of Mobile Medicine (Fire & EMS) and Public Health, is proud to announce that we have completed the import and conversion—for hospital-side consumption—of patient care records (PCRs) from the following eleven leading Fire & EMS patient charting systems, including two by automated feed:
- Stryker HealthEMS (via automated feed)
- ESO Solutions (via automated feed)
- ImageTrend
- Zoll Data
- emsCharts (separately from Zoll)
- Firehouse (separately from ESO Solutions)
- W.A.T.E.R
- Medusa Medical
- Fireworks
- High Plains
- OCI Software (AmbuPro)
- AMR MEDS4 ePCR
- And of course, our own MEDIVIEW ePCR
NHTSA’s Office of EMS says HIPAA should not be a barrier to data sharing with hospitals, yet technology remains a barrier because most electronic patient care records (ePCR) systems cannot share with electronic health records (EHRs). For example, despite widely marketing data exchange products, one of the largest ePCR companies “doesn’t yet support our normal kind of CDAs and it’s not currently on their dev [development] roadmap,” according to a March 2020 email from the implementation services team at EPIC, a leading EHR company. (“CDA” is the Clinical Document Architecture, a federal health data sharing standard.) This disconnect means a custom project is required for users to connect with EHRs and health information exchanges (HIE), or data are only available as PDFs or images.
The MEDIVIEW BEACON Prehospital Health Information Exchange is unique and works differently: it converts data from any NEMSIS v3 or v2 ePCR to a federally standardized HL7 Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) in real-time, so EHRs and HIEs can access discrete Mobile Medical data. Some 300 hospitals and other care facilities are on the network now, including premier facilities affiliated with Sutter, Ascension, Adventist, Integris, Centura, Houston Methodist, and HealthOne, and HIEs including Colorado’s Quality Health Network. The MEDIVIEW BEACON Prehospital Health Information Exchange is used to receive emergency, non-emergency, and interfacility transport data; to refer patients to chronic care; to track COVID-19 exposures; and for substance use disorder interventions.
According to Jonathon Feit, Co-Founder & CEO of Beyond Lucid Technologies: “Our goal with the MEDIVIEW BEACON Prehospital HIE is super-simple: to close the chasm between Mobile Medical Professionals and hospitals using standard formats that Epic, Meditech, and most other EHRs can consume using existing infrastructure. Giving care facilities access to consumable charts centralizes Mobile Medicine’s role while eliminating admin costs. The EMS Agenda 2050 says, ‘Patient medical information is updated in near real time, so the entire care team is aware of what other providers are doing as they are doing it.’ BLT is making interoperability a reality, now and in real-time.”
