Disruptive Technologies in EMS

New technologies, including advances in remote monitoring systems, offer the promise of transforming the delivery of EMS, impacting everything from dispatch to treatment and diagnosis in the prehospital setting and moving EMS toward a more predictive, rather than reactive, response model.

Next month, at the Pinnacle EMS Leadership Forum (pinnacle-ems.com) in San Antonio, TX, Scott Somers, PhD, a professor of public safety practice at Arizona State University and a former member of the National EMS Advisory Committee, and Guillermo Fuentes, MBA, a partner with Fitch & Associates, will speak about the potential of both new and existing technologies to radically disrupt EMS as we know it today. In advance of the conference, I spoke with Somers and Fuentes about how they think technology will overhaul EMS.

Social Media Intelligence to Drive EMS Preparedness
Social media listening technologies offer EMS and other public safety agencies the ability to analyze and interpret public social media conversations in real time, linked to specific geographical areas.

Somers points out that real-time analysis of information such as Facebook posts, tweets and Google searches has been used to track the spread of flu across the U.S., for example. Teams at John Hopkins University and Purdue University have developed algorithms for using social listening to visualize and predict the spread of flu.1, 2

Accurate predictions of the spread of flu or other infectious diseases could help direct the efficient deployment of EMS and healthcare resources—including public education, flu shots, flu treatment and medical personnel—to areas most at risk of severe outbreaks.

To read the complete article, please visit EMSWorld News.