Brazil set to launch first electronic patient care reporting solution.

Brazil set to launch first electronic patient care reporting solution.

Medusa Medical Technologies announced today that São Paulo SAMU 192 service, the largest agency in the federal SAMU EMS Program in Brazil, will be deploying its electronic patient care reporting software, Siren ePCR Suite, this month.  The city of São Paulo will deploy Siren to electronically record all the EMS calls for its 11,000,000 population.

This deployment will see Siren ePCR in 100 base stations and in use by over 2,500 doctors, nurses, paramedics, and staff in the SAMU 192.  São Paulo marks Medusa’s first ePCR contract in South America and is its first deployment in Portuguese.

Medusa and its Brazilian partner, Tevec Metodologia e Sistemas, have been working with the City of São Paulo to develop and implement a unique and customized solution to be rolled out to SAMU 192.  The solution integrates Siren’s robust ePCR and analytics tools to collect, store, and report on historical data with Tevec’s performance monitoring system, which provides SAMU managers with an instant view of the performance level for each of its bases and fleet vehicles.   Tevec will also provide local IT support and communications to SAMU 192.

Luiz Andrade, Tevec’s Director, believes SAMU will be able to quickly realize benefits. “The overall solution provides SAMU managers the ability to analyze information on crews reporting for duty regularly, vehicle and infrastructure condition for each base, logistic effectiveness, and human resource-related issues such as absences, non-conformal crew profiles, and lack of training.”

SAMU 192 receives 9,000 emergency calls a day and after first triage, they respond to approximately 1,300 of those calls.  Until now, they had been using paper to gather important and relevant patient care information from those calls. Adopting an electronic patient care record solution like Siren provides a more comprehensive view of emergency medical care than paper reporting.

“This is a very different and innovative way of collecting data for our agency. This will significantly impact and improve our operations, but more importantly, it advances the way we will deliver patient care in the future”, said Cel. Luiz Carlos Wilke, Director for São Paulo SAMU 192.

Siren’s data analysis tools will generate reports for SAMU 192 to measure the performance of their emergency service delivery across the city. It includes the ability to evaluate case profiles for each base, vehicle crew, including chief complaints, transport times, protocols, procedures, and drug usage.

SAMU’s old system of manually reviewing thousands of patient records and partial data entry did not provide them with enough clinical history for SAMU 192 to properly analyze data.   “It was near impossible to compile the right information at the right time to generate operational and clinical reports”, explains Cel. Wilke. “We will now be able to generate reports in minutes. We can now manage information necessary to properly report on our daily operations, and this is going to help us improve protocols, response times, research efforts, and inevitably our patient outcomes”.

With the addition of SAMU 192 Sao Paulo, there will be more than 12,500 Siren users across the globe in the coming months.  It is anticipated these users will collectively chart over 5,000,000 ePCRs this year.

“This deployment is the first of its kind on this continent,” noted Ian Wilkinson, Director of International Operations with Medusa. “Medusa continues to win new business across the globe, which is a testament to the significant investment we have made in our product over the past 10 years. Siren’s ability to easily integrate and interface with other types of management solutions makes it the perfect fit for the City of São Paulo. We welcome SAMU 192 to our Siren User Group community”.

By adopting this type of innovative electronic reporting solution, SAMU 192 is also helping to highlight Brazil’s progressive and pioneering healthcare initiatives.  And with both the Olympics and the World Cup coming to Brazil in the next few years, this timely adoption emphasizes Brazil’s ability and desire to both provide, and effectively deliver, quality patient care.

In the future, SAMU 192 intends to integrate Siren with other healthcare systems to provide seamless continuity of patient care that was not possible before.