By Art Marroquin & Salvador Hernandez, Orange County Register (California)

Tablet computers can retrieve and send vital information quickly as fire departments in O.C. ditch the paperwork.

With a few screen swipes on his Apple iPad, Capt. Dave Barry of the Anaheim Fire Department can instantly relay information about a patient’s heart attack, flu or other ailment to the nearest hospital.

Barry and other first responders across the region are ditching cumbersome clipboards filled with replicate paperwork and picking up computers to gather critical data during 9-1-1 calls.

“The system is a lot more efficient than going the paper route,” said Barry, a paramedic. “It saves us time and allows us to get information to the hospitals more quickly.”

Fire departments and private ambulance companies serving Orange County have been working since 2006 to figure out how to electronically record patient information in a singular system that meets national and state standards.

Orange County Emergency Medical Services, the local certifying office for paramedics, expects most of the local fire departments to go digital by January except for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which serves La Habra and is still developing its online system. The agency is working to make a similar digital conversion for the 35 private ambulance companies licensed to operate in Orange County, five of which are already online.

The switch in data collection also aims to help first responders detect migrant illnesses, a spate of food poisoning or flu outbreaks in real-time by spotting trends.

The system can also help officials target training needs while determining whether patients are receiving adequate care, said Laurent Repass, who coordinated the creation of the Orange County Medical Emergency Data System, or OC-MEDS.

“It’s been challenging because people, in general, don’t like change,” Repass said. “The biggest hurdle was changing an industry that’s been doing the same thing in the same way for over 30 years.”

Orange County received $1.5 million in grants from the federal Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state Office of Traffic Safety to pay for new computers, Repass said. Funds were distributed based on the volume of medical calls received by fire departments.

The Orange County Fire Authority, which handles emergency calls for 23 of the county’s 34 cities, received the largest chunk. It handled nearly half of the region’s 171,000 medical calls to 9-1-1 during the last fiscal year, Repass said.

OCFA tackled the monumental task of training 1,100 people on the new format, making for one of the largest changes in firefighting that Battalion Chief Bill Lockhart has witnessed.

“I equate it to fire agencies when the fire engines went from being pulled by a horse to actual fire engines,” said Lockhart, a firefighter since 1978. “It’s a real shift.”

Rather than filing five layers of paperwork, electronic tablets can download information on every emergency medical call.

Records of paramedic calls made by a patient can be instantly retrieved. Allergies, medications and medical history are also stored in the database. Storage of patient information meets national security standards.

“This is a long time coming,” Lockhart said. “Regardless of the type of call, we always have the equipment with us.”

The system is in its infancy, and bugs are being worked out.

The fire authority’s new system was initially slow because it drained the agency’s Internet capacity. While some areas of the county don’t have cell access or Wi-Fi, both of which the tablets will use, they can still record the information and relay it as soon as a signal is reached.

While most fire departments opted for a Microsoft Windows-based program, Anaheim and Laguna Beach are using iPads to collect patient information.

Anaheim purchased 75 iPads for the $50,000 that was covered by the federal and state agencies. The iPads were rolled out last month for the department’s 192 firefighters, paramedics and supervisors during medical calls.

“We decided to go in a different direction because the functionality of iPads are simple and nearly everyone in the department already has one,” said Rusty Coffelt, deputy chief of support services for the Anaheim Fire Department.

“The system is a lot more efficient than leaving behind a long paper trail,” Coffelt said. “It saves us time and allows us to get vital information to the hospital more quickly.”

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