A mHealth system for patient handover in emergency medical services

This research uses multiple methods to investigate the use of an enterprise mobile multimedia information system aimed at improving handover of patient and emergency incident information from pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to hospital emergency department providers. A field study was conducted across EMS and hospital organizations in the Boise, Idaho region of the United States for three months to examine use of the system and to assess practitioner perspectives. Findings include perceived benefits and challenges to using digital audio recordings and digital pictures, captured using a smartphone application, for improving the timeliness, completeness, accuracy, convenience, and security of patient information for handover in EMS; limitations on how much data can be collected in the field due to a wide variety of contextual constraints; and a need to better understand the value of video within the EMS handover context.

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