Dedalus is leading the change from episodic care to continuum of care

SECTOR UPDATE - Dedalus

Dedalus is leading the change from episodic care to continuum of care with their amPHI Ambulance and Prehospital solution.

Sharing patient data across hospital boundaries is key to ensure high-quality efficient treatment. Only with accessible data can healthcare providers make accurate and informed decisions. This is especially prevalent in emergency care where it is crucial to have insight to patient data as early as possible, to plan and manage appropriate treatment right from the moment of arrival of the response teams.

Bridging the gap
Visibility to real time prehospital data before patient’s arrival is one of the capabilities of the amPHI Dedalus’ solution for a complete electronic prehospital care record (ePCR). It is an electronic record system that standardises and facilitates communication between dispatch centres, emergency response teams and receiving hospitals.

Not only does the amPHI solution automatically transfer crucial prehospital data directly to hospital teams via amPHI Web dashboards, but it also supports a collaborative care model, where response clinicians and hospital teams can interact via live chat, image and ECG sharing and video conferencing. This enables both the prehospital and receiving hospital teams to prepare for the patient’s treatment even before the ambulance arrives at the destination hospital. Additionally, through integration, previous medical history, allergies, and alerts can flag within the application for consideration by paramedics to support delivery of optimal treatment of the patient on site and in the response vehicle.

In these ways, amPHI can support early initiation of in hospital care, with the aim of contributing to meeting inpatient goals earlier, and ultimately, a timely discharge.

Using data as the key to collaborative care
Knud Buus Pedersen, managing director of Dedalus’ prehospital solutions in Denmark and CEO of amPHI Systems, noted amPHI was one of the first companies globally to develop an ePCR for ambulance services in 2000 to digitise inefficient paper records. Since then, the amPHI team have continuously worked closely with ambulance clinicians to understand and respond to evolving clinical documentation needs. As evidenced in the expansion of the solution’s most recent modules into Secondary Triage and Fleet Management tools, as well as integration considerations to national healthcare databases and information sharing platforms to inform and collaborate with healthcare providers such as GP’s.

In addition to supporting healthcare professionals in the emergency treatment process, a standardised prehospital record gives a unique opportunity to collect data for prehospital research, which is currently underway in Denmark. If the solution is used at a broader scale across a region or even the full country, amPHI turns into a unifying factor in emergency medical services. In the course of time, it represents a tool for ongoing improvements to emergency care, knowledge sharing, research, supervision, and paramedicine training.

Globally, the adoption of ePCR solutions seems to be different across geographies, despite clear evidence that a patient’s prospects of recovering, or even surviving, also relies on the quality and accuracy of the prehospital documentation and information given to the emergency department when the patient is admitted. Denmark’s national system using amPHI collecting and storing data in one central database, has shown a marked improvement in cooperation and coordination between ambulances and hospital teams.

Managing Special Events with amPHI
The full extent of amPHI’s functionality can be best demonstrated in the solution’s capability with large-scale or multi trauma incidents where effective care documentation and incident coordination on all levels of escalation, can be managed to achieve maximum collaboration.

amPHI’s Special Events solution offers users the option to switch focus between the individual patient and the overall logical view of the incident. First responders on scene using amPHI on a mobile device can launch the built in Special Events module. Initiating a serious incident on scene allows responders to rapidly tag and triage patients and record details of the scene while the system automatically populates the web dashboard views for incident coordinators and receiving clinical teams. The dashboard views provide targeted information on the incident, patient, and priority, responding ambulance unit location and ETA to destination hospitals, as well as an opportunity for hospital coordinators to record capacity to best support appropriate direction of patients. The system also supports direct communication between all involved parties to ensure common sharing of knowledge.

Organisational Support with amPHI
The current strain on ambulance response is a real driver for alternate care pathways. A 2022 Australian report cited national ambulance response times were, on average, 16 to 71 mins within capital cities, to 16 to 58 mins statewide. Of the almost 2 million emergency incidents nationally, just over 1 million were recorded as non-urgent. This growing trend supports utilisation of an adjunct system to help alleviate an automatic ambulance dispatch in non-emergent cases. A recent study found 15% (114 589) of one state ambulance workload, was able to be appropriately diverted via secondary triage, to alternate healthcare providers or home care while determining only a small percentage of these patients required ambulance dispatch. amPHI’s Secondary Triage module responds to this need for CAD operators to direct non urgent calls to appropriate clinical teams for further assessment via phone or video chat to better determine if ambulance dispatch is required. The solution is highly configurable and offers organisations the ability to include any required assessments and referral pathways used within each region’s health service.

Another key focus of amPHI has been to help organisations better understand their ambulance fleet utilisation. amPHI’s Fleet Management module provides a tool for organisations to centrally organise and provide feedback on fleet activity and real time utilisation status. The solution provides the ability to create weekly/monthly/yearly utilisation plans to predict fleet availability and review the performance against these plans. amPHI has the capability to monitor the working patterns of the ambulance crew to support consideration of human and vehicle resources together during dispatch. Meal breaks and overtime can be recorded to alert CAD operators to their availability for assignments. Real time dashboard views display the location and assignment status of each vehicle within a specified region to determine availability. Additionally, the module offers in depth data mining capabilities which not only includes utilisation data, but the ability to replay vehicle movements via a map view. From an organisation perspective, these tools can help improve fleet planning and better understand staffing assignment distribution and overtime trends.

Dedalus’ is excited to introduce amPHI to the Australian and New Zealand markets, as a scalable, secure, resilient, and reliable solution. Our dedicated team are focused on continual development, and collaboration with ambulance services to ensure the product meets the markets evolving needs. Our focus on technology and integration with external systems, point-of-care devices, and logistics tools is our driver to continue to optimise the management and transfer of live data.

References
11 Ambulance services - Report on Government Services 2023 - Productivity Commission (pc.gov.au)
Secondary triage in prehospital emergency ambulance services: a systematic review - PubMed (nih.gov)
Ambulance dispatch of older patients following primary and secondary telephone triage in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia: a retrospective cohort study | BMJ Open

Source: Dedalus media release

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