Cool Technology of the Week

I've often been asked how Emergency Medical Services (EMS) run sheets can be automatically integrated to emergency department information systems so that the transition of care between the ambulance and the hospital is seamless.

It's been challenging to do in the past because data was not available electronically from EMS and we lacked an architecture to transmit the information.

In Boston, both problems have been solved.

BIDMC now receives electronic run sheets from each Boston EMS ambulance run, in near real time.

Boston EMS uses the SafetyPad mobile application  to capture patient history electronically during the ambulance run.

The SafetyPAD Application Programming Interface exposes a targeted subset of features of the SafetyPAD platform to developers.

Specifically, the SafetyPAD API accepts GET or POST requests to the primary API endpoint URL and returns one or more results in XML format. In general, developers send requests via GET when retrieving information and via POST when adding, removing or updating information.

As patients arrive at BIDMC, we poll the SafetyPad servers, retrieve the XML and incorporate the record into our Emergency Department Information System, matching patient demographics to insert the data automatically.   A screen shot is above.

Automated mobile EMS data capture followed by incorporating to hospital information systems using XML and a RESTful API.  That's cool!