Heart patients to benefit from new Internet technology

From left: Bedford County EMS director Chad Graham, County Mayor Eugene Ray, Heritage Medical Center physician Christopher Rone, HMC Chief of Staff Howard Rupard and HMC CEO Dan Buckner celebrate the agreement which will place wireless Internet access in BCEMS ambulances. (Submitted photo)

A partnership between Bedford County Emergency Medical Services and Heritage Medical Center could make more and better cardiac information available to doctors while a patient is en route to the hospital.

Over the past several years, BCEMS has been upgrading its cardiac monitors from older "three-lead" models to "12-lead" models, which use more electrodes to produce a much more detailed analysis of heart rhythms and function.

But tight county budgets have prevented BCEMS from taking the next step -- wireless Internet cards and service which will allow this more-detailed information to be transmitted to the hospital in real time, while the patient is en route.

Now, Heritage Medical Center's parent company, Brentwood-based Community Health Systems, has agreed to fund four wireless Internet cards for the next two years at a cost of $50 per card per month. The company had to confirm that this type of partnership would not be considered anti-competitive or a conflict of interest.

"Heritage has done us a great deed here," said BCEMS board member Whitney Neeley following a presentation to the board about the new service Monday night.

The Internet connections will allow the EKG readings to be sent to any hospital, not just Heritage. The information could help doctors decide whether a particular patient should be treated locally, sent to Nashville by land or sent by air evac helicopter.

Philips, the maker of the cardiac monitors used by BCEMS, will conduct refresher training for the ambulance service's staff to make sure that the 12-lead monitors are being used correctly.

The wireless Internet connections will be useful for more than just EKGs, said BCEMS director Chad Graham. Ambulance crews will be able to look up severe weather information, for example, and BCEMS is studying the possibility of interfacing with Bedford County Communications Center so that computer-assisted dispatch information could be displayed in ambulance units while they're en route to the scene of an emergency.

In other discussion at Monday night's BCEMS board meeting:

BCEMS collections for the year remain ahead of projections. Graham said that the service may try to ask the county to use the excess funds to remount one of its ambulance boxes onto a new chassis. BCEMS used to be on a fixed schedule for replacing or remounting ambulances, but the past few years of tight county budgets have meant that no units have been purchased or remounted.

Call volume appeared to be down in March compared to the same month in 2008, although later in the meeting, while studying vehicle utilization reports, board members noticed two days with almost no ambulance calls listed, and Graham said it's possible that some runs weren't properly accounted for in BCEMS's computer system during the two days when the com center was upgrading its computer-aided dispatch software.