Facility Reports From the Field
EMS Magazine presents case reports on the latest technologies and equipment being deployed in the field. Front-line providers share their experiences on their use of the products featured below.
General Devices’ CAREpoint EMS Workstation
The University of Chicago Medical Center’s EMS department handles around 70 telemetry calls every day. Recording and storing them, as you might imagine, is a challenge.
“I used to use VCR tapes,” says Laura Eggers, the hospital’s EMS director. “We recorded them and kept them for 30 days, then we had to recycle them.”
A better way was needed, and when Eggers discovered General Devices’ CAREpoint EMS Workstation at an associated city hospital, she found her solution. “It seemed,” she says, “the most up-to-date and interactive thing we could choose.”
The hospital has now installed three of the Workstations, which combine essential emergency-care elements into a single desktop system for ED-based prehospital care providers. The CAREpoint integrates radio, cellular, landline, voice-data logging, Internet, Intranet, telemetry and more. The need for multiple radios, phones, computers, logging recorders, books and manuals is thus eliminated. It can also run most standard ED software.
The hospital’s Workstations are interfaced with Chicago’s 9-1-1 system, and give users one-touch access to fire department SOPs and protocols. Oversight tools have been developed for hospital bypass situations. Work is ongoing to make the units interfacility-capable, so users throughout the university’s hospital system can share information.
“Those communications tools will be important,” says Eggers. “If I’m doing surveillance or looking specifically for public health issues, it’s right there in front of people. It’s going to make it much simpler, and information will get spread much more quickly.”
Oh, and storing those telemetry calls is easier now too.
“By doing them digitally,” Eggers says, “I can store weeks’ worth of information on a single CD.”
For more information, call 201/313-7075, or visit www.general-devices.com.
Smiths Medical Offers the Capnocheck II Capnograph/ Oximeter
Half a decade or so ago, the technology was new and impressive. Now, in 2005, it’s still state-of-the-art and serving patients well.
When North Memorial Ambulance Service in Minneapolis was looking, in the late 1990s, to replace its capnography units, the service’s quality resource coordinator, Kim Tast, came upon the Capnocheck II Capnograph/Oximeter. From BCI International (which in 1999 was acquired by Smiths Medical), the Capnocheck II offered several advantages over the model it was replacing.
“Our staff was used to using our older, mainstream, semi-quantitative devices that didn’t give you a waveform or a digital reading,” says Tast. “This actually gave them a reading and, more important, a waveform. And it wasn’t just a stand-alone end-tidal CO2 monitor; it combined a pulse oximeter, which made it a nice little cost-effective package that was very easy to use.”
Over time, the department—which serves the Minneapolis area, as well as other areas throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin —acquired about 70 Capnocheck IIs, which are still serving its patients today. The device measures EtCO2, respiration rate, SpO2 and pulse rate with N2O compensation for patients from pediatric to adult. Its monitor features a backlit LCD display with on-screen trending and high and low alarm limits for all parameters. Its infrared serial interface allows patient information to be downloaded to a printer.
Though prohibited by policy from officially endorsing any product, Tast says the Capnocheck IIs have exceeded his expectations. Beyond that, BCI/Smiths has been easy to work with.
“We had some issues early on with low-perfusion readings on the pulse oximetry side,” he says. “When we addressed that with them, they upgraded our units by putting digital boards into every one of them, and that solved it.” The company also made some software changes to make options easier to enable and disable. Says Tast: “They were very accommodating.”
For more information, call 800/558-2345, or visit www.smiths-medical.com.
