Department
Ambulance / EMS
The most valuable thing an ambulance carries is often information, and it is the thing most reliably left behind. A crew that tells the hospital what is coming changes what the hospital can have ready.
One call
From the phone to the trolley.
The call becomes a case.
Dispatch runs as a tracked procedure rather than a phone call somebody remembers, with an owner and a clock from the first minute.
The crew records on the way.
The trip record is a form the service designed, filled in the vehicle and locked when it is finished.
The emergency room is told.
Pre-arrival notification reaches the receiving team before the patient does, over an audited channel with a delivery log.
The arrival is the same patient.
The trip attaches to the visit that opens at the door, so the handover is a continuation rather than a fresh registration.
The trip is billed.
Trip charges post from the same event, and reach the bill with everything else the episode produced.
Impact and action
Dispatch on a phone.
- A call is taken, a vehicle is sent, and the only record of either is in one person’s memory and a register at the gate.Dispatch and the trip run as a repeatable procedure with a live board, and a step running late is flagged while it can still be acted on.Cadence
- Nobody can say how long the service took to reach anywhere, so the question is answered by anecdote.Falcon reads response and turnaround from the same records the crew filled, and shows where each figure came from.Falcon
An emergency room taken by surprise.
- The receiving team learns what is arriving when it arrives, so the room, the blood and the specialist are arranged after the trolley is through the door.Pre-arrival notification goes out on an approved template over an audited channel, with sent, delivered and read logged against the case. [Source 27](/research#ref-prehospital-notification)Raven
- A time-critical protocol starts at the door rather than in the vehicle.The protocol runs as a timed procedure from the moment the case opens, so the clock a review will ask about is running before arrival.Cadence
The trip that vanished.
- The trip record is on paper in the vehicle, so the medico-legal file is incomplete and the trip is never charged.The trip record is a locked form on the patient record, and the charge posts from the same object.GlyphVault
- Vehicle checks, oxygen levels and equipment readiness are recorded in a book in the ambulance bay.Checks run as scheduled tasks against the vehicle as an asset in the hospital twin, and a missed check is visible.Quest
The published record
What telling the hospital first is worth.
In an analysis of 371,988 stroke arrivals by ambulance at 1,585 hospitals, pre-arrival notification by the crew was associated with faster imaging, faster treatment and a higher proportion of eligible patients treated inside the window. Source 27 The same analysis records that notification happened for only about two thirds of arrivals.
And what the emergency room does with the warning.
Emergency department crowding is associated with higher inpatient mortality and longer time to treatment for time-critical conditions. Source 19 A department that knows what is coming can decide where it goes before it is standing in the corridor.
The tools this service runs on.
Each row is what the tool does for the crew and the control room, with the example they would recognise.
| Tool | What it does here | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Runs dispatch and the trip as a tracked procedure with a live board. | A crew still on scene past a threshold is visible to the control room. |
| Raven | Delivers the pre-arrival notice on an approved template, and logs delivery. | The emergency room has the age, the complaint and the estimated arrival before the vehicle turns in. |
| Gate | Opens the visit the trip attaches to. | The arrival continues the case rather than starting a new registration. |
| Glyph | Runs the trip record and the consent forms, locked once completed. | The crew’s record is unalterable the moment it is finished. |
| Vault | Puts the trip on the bill from the same event. | A trip charge appears on the episode rather than on a separate book. |
| Quest | Schedules vehicle and equipment checks against the asset. | An oxygen check due on a vehicle appears on the crew’s own list. |
Interdepartmental