Village Ambulance gets laptops

By Jennifer Huberdeau, North Adams Transcript
Article Launched: 07/03/2008 10:48:54 AM EDT



Thursday, July 3
WILLIAMSTOWN -- Emergen-cy medical technicians have a new tool to aid them at the scene of an accident or during a routine medical call -- laptop computers are replacing the pink carbon-copy patient care records that once had to be filled out.
Village Ambulance Service in Williamstown took its new wireless Panasonic Toughbook laptops online June 16, allowing EMTs and paramedics the ability to fill out electronic patient care records on the lap-size computers and transmit the records to both the ambulance headquarters on Water Street and the fax machines of emergency departments at local hospitals in a matter of minutes.

"Each of our three ambulances are equipped with a wireless router which allows the laptops to connect to the Internet while still on the road," Cara Miller, office manager for Village Ambulance, said Wednesday. "We're connecting through Verizon and haven't had any problems yet."

She said the laptops, which are equipped with a touch screen, stylus writing instrument and keyboard, have fully eliminated the company's need for the carbon copy patient care forms, which were supplied to the local hospitals, the service, it's billing company and the doctor overseeing quality assurance.

"Now, with the push of a button, it's sent in a PDF (portable document format) file to office, billing and quality assurance through e-mail and sent as a fax to the hospitals," Miller said. "North Adams Regional



will eventually have a system that we can integrate with to send the PDF to them as well. The transmission is almost instantaneous."
Shawn Godfrey, operations manager, said the laptops would have a learning curve for staff members, but the were sure to improve overall patient care.

"The screens all have prompts on them, which make sure you've completed a certain part of the report before moving on," he said. "In the long run, it's going to make a vast improvement."

Tom Bleezarde, president of the service's board of directors, said the laptops are already eliminating a "lot of extra key stroking."

"A lot of forms were filled in by hand, then someone had to type those forms in here, at the billing office, at the hospital," he said.

The system cost a little over $20,000, Bleezarde said, which was paid for through annual fundraising efforts and two donations that were not earmarked for specific items.

While Village was the first to implement the system in the county, it isn't the only one to make use of the new technology. The North Adams Ambulance Service took its system "live" on Tuesday, making it the second service in the county to have the laptop technology.

"We have the same system in our three ambulances and our supervisor's vehicle," John Meaney, director of the ambulance service, said Wednesday. "We knew this technology was going to be needed, so we included it in our annual fundraiser that kicked off last October."

He said the laptops are going to be need for a statewide reporting system that will require all ambulance services to electronically submit certain information from their patient care records to the commonwealth.

"They'll be using the information to compile statistics -- for trending purposes -- for example, to see if a certain area has had a lot of difficulty breathing calls," Meaney said. "The data might indicate there is something with the air quality or maybe that a pandemic is starting."

He said one of the benefits of changing over to the paperless system is the elimination of paper records being stored on-site.

"We'll be able to burn the reports to disc for our record keeping, which will eliminate the 12 to 13 boxes per year that we are required to store for seven years," Meaney said.

Daniel LaPlante, manager of the Adams Ambulance Service, said the company wouldn't be far behind with the installation of its own system.

"Our goal is to have our two ambulances up by September," he said. "We are using money we have set aside and money from our fundraiser to put the system in place. It's something the state is looking to require by November, I believe, but in the long run it will be well worth the investment."