Revolutionizing Emergency Care:
Setting A New Standard in Patient Triage, Tracking and Treatment Electronic patient Triage and Tracking Solution for Arlington and Fairfax counties, Virginia
Emergency healthcare providers throughout the United States are increasingly recognizing the need for a more coordinated, efficient approach to communications during a local, state or national emergency.
At the incident scene, first respon‐ ders need a better way to record and track vital health information about the injured. At the command center, lead‐ ers need a better way to assess where to allocate resources and to send patients during an emergency. At the hospital, healthcare providers need instant access to vital data on the emergency patients arriving at their facilities.
The U.S. Federal government has also recognized the need to improve and streamline patient triage, tracking and treatment. The Department of Homeland Security recently initiated a process whereby health organizations will develop a standards‐based method of tracking patients and sharing infor‐ mation on available healthcare resources across jurisdictional bound‐ aries.
That’s a big reason why Captain Robert Pye of the Arlington County Fire Department and Battalion Chief Glenn Bydume of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department began looking for a solution that would improve the patient tracking process in Northern Virginia — one that could eventually be expanded to other neighboring areas as well.
Located in Northern Virginia, the Arlington County Fire Department and Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department recognized the need to improve triage, tracking and cross‐juris‐
dictional communications in emer‐ gency health‐care situations. So they began searching for a solution to help them improve patient care and track‐ ing from the incident scene all the way through to hospital admission. The fire and rescue teams soon dis‐ covered an electronic patient triage and tracking system that stood out from the rest: the HC Patient Tracking System from Global Emergency Resources. The HC Patient Tracking System uses Motorola Solutions’ MC75 handheld computers to transmit vital patient health information and pictures of injuries to command centers, hospi‐ tals and other emergency management agencies in real‐time.
The electronic patient triage and tracking system was put to the test by the Arlington and Fairfax counties fire and rescue teams, using it to handle triage and patient tracking during two key regional events: the Army Ten Miler and the Marine Corps Marathon. In both pilots, the system performed beyond expectations, resulting in effi‐ cient triage, tracking and treatment of patients at both events.
“UPS can track a package halfway across the world but we can’t track patients in the healthcare system to find out exactly where they are,” says Arlington County’s Pye. “It’s important for us to see where our patients are at any time. When you plug technology into our standard triage procedures, it lets us do so much more than we can do today.”
When Pye and Bydume saw Motorola’s MC75 and the HC Patient Tracking System from Global Emergency Resources in action, they
decided to test it across jurisdictional boundaries via a joint pilot project.
Electronic Tracking and Triage in Action
Within 90 days after receiving fund‐ ing for the project from the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), two pilots of the system were held in con‐ junction with the Army Ten Miler and the Marine Corp Marathon, two long‐ distance runs that each registers more than 30,000 runners and cross jurisdic‐ tional boundaries.
At the two events, first responders used the Motorola MC75 devices to successfully “tag” more than 100 indi‐ viduals using triage tags. Around 75 of the “patients” scanned during the pilot were for testing purposes; about 25 individuals had actual injuries. The triage tags contain a unique bar code number that becomes the patient’s identification when it is scanned by the Motorola MC75. During the pilot, first responders used the devices to enter a complete range of patient data into each patient’s elec‐ tronic file, including essential patient information and vitals as well as audio and pictures. In a real‐world disaster situation, each MC75 could be used to scan and maintain records on as many as 1,000 patients.
Thanks to the global positioning sys‐ tem (GPS) capabilities of the MC75 devices, a patient’s exact location can be accessed at all times. Each time a patient is relocated, his tag is scanned, and the device notes his location using the available GPS coordinates.
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