Devising an architecture for time-critical information services: inter-organizational performance data components for emergency medical service (EMS)

This paper reports on a case study analysis of a county-wide emergency medical services (EMS) system striving to implement information technology across service provider organizations (e.g., fire, ambulance, dispatch center, hospitals) to enhance e-governmental emergency response performance. An analysis of performance data and supplemental interviews from emergency response organizations are used to inform this study. From these data sources, researchers performed process and information flow analysis across a chain of dispatchers, responders, and health care facilities to understand barriers and challenges to accessing and linking time-critical data across service organizations. The analytical lens is a socio-technical framework developed from prior e-government research on time-critical information services (TCIS), or public services highly dependent upon time and information (e.g., emergency response, law enforcement). Findings include inter-organizational gaps in data access across pre-hospital and hospital information systems, the need for patient tracking across organizations and systems to enable end-to-end analysis, and time and quality of care benefits to inter-organizational data access and use. The National Intelligent Transportation System Architecture is applied to the case study location to validate the functionality of the TCIS framework and to provide strategic guidance for the case study locale. Recommendations are provided on how the architecture can be adapted to enhance end-to-end performance of EMS systems.