By Peter von Buol
Special to Inside
When a large-scale disaster strikes, hospital emergency rooms in that area often overflow with incoming patients and it is difficult to process patients using traditional handwritten medical records.
Unfortunately, even the emergency room of Manhattan's largest hospital was unprepared when it received more than 1,200 patients within three hours from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The large volume of patients made it extremely difficult to quickly and adequately process patient records.
On Friday, Dr. Robert Bonvino, vice-president of governmental affairs at New York University's Downtown Hospital, discussed how his hospital's emergency room was flooded with patients and how his hospital's personnel coped with the influx. The talk was part of a conference held at Chicago's McCormick Place Hyatt Regency Hotel.
That fateful day, medical personnel needed a quick way to record and process patient information but the traditional method of using a pen to write patient information on paper medical charts was simply too slow. At the time, no adequate alternative was available.
In order to prevent a similar scenario from recurring, Bonvino's hospital partnered with Emergency Care Documentation Systems (ECDS), a Chicago-based medical technology company, to develop a computer-based terrorism preparedness and disaster management system.
The hospital and ECDS developed a system, www.BioAlert.md, which is an information network that allows patient information to be shared electronically among all medical personnel, including paramedics, emergency rooms and hospital physicians. The system also detects and tracks unusual activity that may indicate a bio-terrorist attack or even a conventional epidemic.
According to Kimberly Alise, chief executive officer of ECDS, Downtown Hospital's experience with treating patients from a real-life large-scale disaster was invaluable in developing BioAlert.md.
"Because [we were] able to partner with NYU's Downtown Hospital, the 9/11 hospital, we had access to real-world expertise that can not be matched. Everyone agrees that had they been able to use BioAlert along with our company's electronic emergency room program, EmpowER, they would have prevented all the missing charts on 9/11 and also improved [medical] triaging and other logistical processes," said Alise.
Last September, the BioAlert system was employed as an early warning and tracking system for the city of Chicago.
According to Annie Blaase, vice-president for public relations and education at ECDS, the Web site was developed to assist local public health officials and federal homeland security personnel so they can quickly respond to a potential health crisis. By identifying potential community epidemics and bio-terrorism attacks, it allows rapid early intervention. In addition, it can also be used to manage other disasters, said Blaase.
Within the next three years, the company projects communities throughout the nation will be implementing similar early warning and detection systems.
In February, Alise participated in a forum headed by Dr. David Brailer, national health information coordinator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the meeting, Alise discussed with Brailer how BioAlert.md was scheduled to be implemented in May at NYU's Downtown Hospital.
ECDS was formed in 1999 to produce what they say is a "user-friendly" computer software program, EmpowER, geared towards hospital emergency-rooms and producing an entirely electronic medical record for patients.
Emergency room physician and company co-founder Dr. Seth Guterman formed the company after he discovered he was unable to purchase a program that was entirely electronic and which he believed was necessary to reduce the waiting time spent by patients at the hospital. |
