Connecting Rural Care Providers

When the nearest hospital is miles away, advanced communications can shorten the distance between the patient and lifesaving care.

Matt Tatum, MA, NREMT-P, FF, director of public safety for Henry County, VA, knows this firsthand. For the past year, emergency services in his rural community have been using the GD e-Bridge system. Often, he says, “When we pick up the patient and get them to the ambulance, we’re still 20 or 25 minutes from the closest hospital.”

With the e-Bridge system, EMS crews now send secure text, photos, videos, ECGs and other data from the scene to the hospital emergency department. “It allows the ED to be more prepared for what’s coming in,” he says.

In other cases, Tatum says, the ED physician has used the system to alert a cardiologist, who was at the hospital when the patient arrived. And the ability to send video clips has allowed EMS teams to get physician input when assessing patients for stroke or other conditions.

Tatum says the e-Bridge system also helps improve care in a community that relies on a combination of career and volunteer EMS services.

“A lot of our volunteers are trained as EMT-Basics only,” he says. “When they get that critical patient, the career departments will bring them a paramedic if they need it. With the e-Bridge system, the EMT can send images or messages to the paramedic before he or she gets on scene.”

It’s also helpful that the technology requires little training.

Another advantage for Tatum’s community: compatibility with the varied 12-lead ECG technology used among nine first-responder agencies in the region. “The GD product is universal. It works with any of them,” says Tatum. 

As a next step, Tatum plans to trial the live-streaming video capabilities of e-Bridge and hopes to implement that with a mobile integrated healthcare service in the future. Plans are still in their early stages, but Tatum foresees it as a way to extend care into the community through both scheduled patient visits and non-life-threatening 9-1-1 calls.