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An Emergency System to Improve Ambulance Dispatching, Ambulance Diversion and Clinical Handover Communication—A Proposed Model

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Abstract

Effective communication in healthcare is important and especially critical in emergency situations. In this paper we propose a new comprehensive emergency system which facilitates the communication process in emergency cases from ambulance dispatch to the patient’s arrival and handover in the hospital. The proposed system has been designed to facilitate and computerize all the processes involved in an accident from finding the nearest ambulance through to accessing a patient’s online health record which can assist in pre-hospital treatments. The proposed system also locates the nearest hospital specializing in the patient’s condition and will communicate patient identification to the emergency department. The components of the proposed system and the technologies used in building this system are outlined in this paper as well as the challenges expected and proposed solutions to these challenges.

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Acknowledgement

This work is part of a two year research project which has been fully funded by a grant through King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)/National Plan for Science and Technology (NPST) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Grant number: 09-INF880-02

Conflict of interest

No conflict of interest declared.

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Correspondence to Basema Saddik.

Additional information

Authorship: S.El-Masri developed and conceived the proposed system and reviewed final drafts of this manuscript. B. Saddik drafted and reviewed this manuscript.

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El-Masri, S., Saddik, B. An Emergency System to Improve Ambulance Dispatching, Ambulance Diversion and Clinical Handover Communication—A Proposed Model. J Med Syst 36, 3917–3923 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-012-9863-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-012-9863-x

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