EMT Mary Hefferan accessing the Twiage smartphone application.
May 26,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ ,Ridgewood Emergency Services recently became one of the first EMS providers in New Jersey to participate in a pilot trial of Twiage, a novel prehospital communication and ambulance triage system that accelerates life-saving emergency care. The trial sponsored by Valley Hospital, will utilize Twiage’s smartphone platform aimed to streamline and accelerate the care of patients with medical emergencies upon arrival at the hospital. “Believe it or not, we are in the 21 st Century, but radios are still the current standard of communication between ambulances and the emergency room. Nurses have to step away from patient care to take incoming ambulance calls without knowing which ambulance calls carry patients with critical conditions, ” said John Hui, Executive Vice President of Twiage.
Ridgewood EMTs can use Twiage’s secured smartphone app to capture patient vital signs and demographic information via photos and videos, so hospital emergency departments can improve preparedness for incoming patients. Designed to reduce reliance on antiquated radio communication, Twiage is a HIPAA-compliant system that delivers real-time situational awareness of incoming ambulances to busy emergency departments by providing live patient data and GPS-tracked ETA for all incoming ambulances.
Valley Hospital is one of the early pioneers in the country to launch Twiage. The care of nearly 150 patients to Valley Hospital has been coordinated over the Twiage platform in just 2 months. Ridgewood EMS Captain Murray Yang said, “I believe this program can be of great benefit to achieve our duties as Emergency Medical Technicians. Every second matters in achieving apositive outcome for a patient who's in need of emergency medical care. Twiage can reduce our patient turnover time to definitive care by 5 to 10 minutes. In turn, this application will fortify our objective as an organization, the commitment of the 100+ volunteers, who have, and will continue to provide the upmost quality of emergency medical care for the residents of the Village of Ridgewood and its visitors." In addition to Ridgewood Emergency Services, Valley Hospital
EMS and Paramus EMS are also participating in this pilot trial.
