Quicker and better care: medDV delivers up-to-date patient data to the hospital – mobile and network-independent

Enhancing Emergency Response

Emergency vehicles at the scene of an accident – an image unfortunately all too common in everyday life. Rescuers are often under enormous time pressure, as they aim to provide casualties with the best care as quickly as possible and transport them to the nearest suitable hospital.

It’s important the hospital has an accurate diagnosis from the paramedics, so they can treat the casualties as effectively and quickly as possible. A phone call from the scene is helpful, but often not sufficient, and verbal communication can easily lead to misunderstandings. The diagnosis also needs to be entered into the hospital's system, further increasing the chance of miscommunication or data entry error.

There is a better solution, where paramedics enter information about a patient's condition on a tablet along with the automatic upload of data from medical devices (such as an ECG), all of which directly links to the hospital. By combining data from medical devices with the paramedic's diagnosis, an initial, relatively comprehensive picture of the injuries is created for the hospital to ready an effective treatment plan for the patient’s arrival.

It may sound simple, but the complexity of multiple mobile networks makes for a costly administrative challenge.

Cross-network communication

In Germany, three independent mobile operators – Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefonica – provide the infrastructure for mobile communications. It means even if one or two networks are available, a customer on the third provider may not have mobile reception. In addition, there are still numerous dead spots in Germany (places where there’s no mobile phone reception).

This is rarely the case in urban areas, but in rural areas the "no network" message on cell phones is more common, limiting the ability of emergency services to provide hospitals with patient data in a timely manner.

In cooperation with A1 Digital, medDV has solved this problem. Carsten Rausch, CEO of medDV, said: "We supported the Bavarian Red Cross as a partner in the area of mobile communication. The BRK had more than 1,500 SIM cards in use and wanted to focus less on administration and more on helping people in need. The administrative burden was simply too great.”

At the same time, BRK is driving digital transformation. This includes faster delivery of potentially life-saving information about injured people from the scene of an accident to hospitals.

Network prioritization eliminated

"In order to ensure the best possible coverage for the emergency services in the field, it’s necessary to always provide several SIM cards for data transmission. This increases the administrative burden even more - and we're talking about several thousand cards," explains Rausch. The greater the investment in SIM card management, the fewer resources are available for rescue operations and other assistance.

In addition, each mobile operator prioritizes its own network. This increases the effort required to make the best use of the cards and it increases the cost to the emergency services. A solution was needed to put a stop to the growing administrative effort, one that’s not tied to the network prioritization of the providers and one that makes best use of all available data packages.

"Together with A1 Digital, we then looked for a solution that would address these very different problem areas," says the medDV CEO.

The result? Emergency services can get a single SIM card from medDV to access several networks. "This means we now have one card that serves multiple networks. This makes it much easier for the emergency services to make the data available to the clinics," says Rausch.

Volume pooling and dual encryption

This approach also allows medDV to manage SIM cards from any operator in a consistent way. It enables the creation of a shared pool of data volumes. Rausch explains: "Normally, mobile operators allocate a certain amount of data to each SIM card. But with our system, if a SIM card doesn't use all of its data, the unused data can be moved into a shared pool. Then, when another SIM card needs more data, it can use what's in the pool. We're able to monitor exactly how much data each SIM card is using, which helps us keep costs as low as possible."

Efficient data transmission to the hospital was not the only important aspect of the project. "Security is also very important to us," emphasizes Rausch. medDV developed double encryption for the solution which runs on medDV tablets, some of which are even equipped with two slots for SIM cards, giving the teams at the scene even more flexibility.

"On our tablets, the data is encrypted before transmission. But that's not enough for us, so we also encrypt the data transmission itself. After all, this is particularly sensitive patient health data that needs to be protected," says Rausch.

Summary

In cooperation with A1 Digital, medDV has developed a solution to improve the transmission of patient data from the scene of an accident to the hospital. The solution includes a SIM card that can serve multiple networks and is managed uniformly. Data volumes can be made available as a pool, which saves costs. In addition, dual encryption has been developed to ensure the security of sensitive health data. The solution provides more efficient help to patients in need and supports the goal of providing life-saving information more quickly.