October 2022
[originally published on Juvare.com; written by Colin Garrison]
The challenge facing Illinois EMS Region IV was one familiar to any jurisdiction that holds large events such as car races, marathons, and air shows: keeping track of patients as they are seen by paramedics and transported to aid stations and hospitals.
By implementing Juvare EMTrack, Region IV made those problems a thing of the past.
Paramedic Michael Gilbert has seen it all. As the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) System Manager for EMS Region IV in southwestern Illinois, he provides medical oversight for nine private ambulance services and 54 fire departments. He supervised the EMS response after a tornado carved through an Amazon warehouse in December 2021. He also worked at the New Orleans airport after Hurricane Katrina, loading hundreds of patients per hour on aircraft for medical transport to other parts of the country.
Gilbert’s seven-county EMS region regularly hosts large events such as NASCAR races, air shows, marathons, and beer festivals. Such events pose obvious challenges in terms of treating the large number of people who might need medical care. They present another challenge that is less obvious but well-known to EMS professionals: that of keeping track of patients.
“The medical staff never know how many patients they see,” says Gilbert, describing the typical situation at a large event.
As patients are picked up from out in the crowd, brought to the first aid center, and taken to hospitals, they come under the care of many different paramedics, nurses, and doctors. Keeping track of how many patients have received care, who they are, who treated them, and where they are is a major challenge.
The resulting confusion has real-world consequences. It limits the situational awareness of the incident commander and makes it hard to hold care providers accountable. It impedes planning and budgeting for event organizers. And it can make it difficult to provide patients with documentation of their experience after the fact (if needed for litigation, for example).
Around 15 years ago, however, Gilbert and his EMS region discovered a way to bring order out of chaos. A grant enabled them to implement Juvare EMTrack. (Initially, only three counties in Gilbert’s region obtained the tool, but it was eventually adopted by his whole region and the entire state EMS system.)
What is Juvare EMTrack? It is a lightweight, web-based patient and population tracking solution that leverages robust mobile integration to make it easy for EMS managers and others to effectively track patients during large events, mass-casualty incidents (MCIs), and natural and human-caused disasters.
As an EMS system manager, Gilbert has used EMTrack in managing dozens of events and incidents, including most recently a marathon, a NASCAR race, an Oktoberfest celebration, an air show, and the Amazon warehouse collapse.
EMTrack provides a clean, simple solution to some of the most challenging problems his people face in providing medical care at large events.
“The first piece we use it for is tracking,” he says.
EMTrack eliminates the common problem of one patient being counted multiple times, once at each point of contact.
“It lets us know we didn’t see three patients, we saw one,” he says.
The second major benefit of EMTrack for Region IV is enabling accountability.
“It’s my responsibility to be able to tell you where each patient went and what happened to them,” says Gilbert. “EMTrack gives us the accountability of knowing where each patient went and who made the contact.”
EMTrack brings benefits not just during the event but also many years down the road.
“If there’s litigation five years from now,” says Gilbert, “with EMTrack, instead of trying to find the paper trail, we can sort, filter, and run reports that show where the person went and who touched them.”
As an EMS incident commander, Gilbert also appreciates how EMTrack enhances situational awareness.
“The paramedics can pop vital sign information into EMTrack when they pick up patients,” he explains. When they arrive at the field hospital, this information can easily be reviewed by the IC.
“EMTrack allows the incident commander to see who is where,” he adds. “It tells us how many patients we have in the first aid building, how many in the field hospital, how many on the UTVs.”
EMTrack has also helped his region with planning—and could potentially be useful during public health investigations.
“When we’re preplanning for resources, we usually overplan,” he says. Having accurate information about the number of patients treated at past events allows organizers to plan upcoming events with more confidence and cost efficiency.
And Gilbert recently had a conversation with an FBI agent who said EMTrack could help investigators if there was an outbreak of food-borne illness at an event. The tool’s tracking capability could help law enforcement “put two and two together” to determine if illness was being caused deliberately, according to the agent.
A key reason Region IV’s use of EMTrack has been so successful is how easy the tool is to use and learn.
“Most of the guys that we have had use it at special events love it,” says Gilbert about the paramedics on his team. “They carry the app on their phones. They like that it’s simple to use and that it eliminates paper copies.”
He has used EMTrack on Android and Apple phones as well as on desktop and tablet computers.
“It all works great,” he says. “You can use it on pretty much anything.”
EMTrack also makes it easy for paramedics to collect patients’ identifying information and connect it with them physically.
“If they have their driver’s license, we can scan that and link it with the barcode on a strap we put around their wrist,” says Gilbert.
At the marathon the process is even easier.
“We send the bib numbers to Juvare, and they build it all in to the back,” says Gilbert. “When we enter their bib number, all their information comes up automatically.”
Why do Michael Gilbert and Illinois EMS Region IV use Juvare EMTrack? Because it makes it easy for them to track patients, achieve accountability, improve situational awareness, and obtain, store, and recall accurate patient data.
These functionalities allow them to focus more on caring for their patients, thus improving the health of the people of southwestern Illinois.