OPEN Incorporated, makers of the SafetyPAD Suite of software products, announced the launch of its infectious disease screening and monitoring initiative to assist Fire and Emergency Medical Services identify potential infectious disease risks.
Rapidly developed in response to the growing worldwide concerns of pandemic threats, including Ebola Virus Disease, the feature enables care providers to recognize infectious disease candidates and quickly share critical information automatically to receiving facilities, various departments and community health staff.
“We greatly appreciate the efforts and risks care providers are exposed to every day and believe that our initiative provides a simple, manageable and effective process to recognize potential infectious disease cases to support all of our customers and their communities,” noted Mike Vukovich, Founder of OPEN incorporated. “Early recognition of risk patients by EMTs and Paramedics allows these care providers to take additional precautions to protect themselves and their patient while quickly communicating these concerns to a receiving hospital or the community’s health department.”
Vukovich added, “Reducing hospital turnaround times while ensuring comprehensive yet rapid documentation is even more vital in these types of scenarios and this process continues to follow our emphasis of providing effective solutions to allow care providers to focus more on patient care and less on paperwork.”
These features are part of the SafetyPAD electronic patient care reporting system that is used to assist with the diagnosis, care, treatment and record keeping done by EMT and Paramedics on scene. Doing so will help spot early trends of a wide range of potential pandemic events. The technology initiative is in response to a continually growing concern by various agencies throughout the U.S. who may be on the front lines of such incidents. Numerous SafetyPAD EMS agencies, including many of those serving 6 of the 15 top metro areas in the U.S., have deployed this powerful feature.
"The additional logic and data collection points that SafetyPAD added to our ePCR system will help identify potential infectious disease criteria and these fields helps assist our EMS field providers in assessing whether or not the patient presents a possible risk of exposure to an infectious disease. SafetyPAD has a unique automatic alert inherent to our current system that we were able to easily set-up to notify command staff whenever a report is sent that contains an impression of Potential Infectious Disease Risk,” noted Leslee Stein-Spencer, RN, MS, Manager of Medical Administration and Regulatory Compliance for the Chicago Fire Department
Ms. Stein-Spencer also expressed, "This addition provides real-time alerting to multiple members of our agency as well as provides interactive prompts to the field users to document regions traveled to that may present a risk of infectious disease.”
About Open Incorporated:
Founded in 1993, OPEN Incorporated is a leader in electronic patient care reporting that develops software products for the Fire & EMS industry, enhancing their abilities to serve the public. With more than 20 years of developing highly successful electronic EMS informatics solutions, the company’s SafetyPAD software and related technologies have been successfully deployed at numerous high performance Fire and EMS services, including the largest EMS provider in 6 of the 15 US top metro areas.
More information can be found at www.safetypad.com.