The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) is conducting a statewide pilot of a new Web-based patient tracking system that officials say will aid in the reunification of survivors of mass casualty incidents — like the recent shooting in Norway or the tornado in Joplin , Mo. — with their family and friends. The system will facilitate early notification to friends and family regarding the conditions and whereabouts of patients.
“People may not have identification on them, and they could be unconscious,” said Denny Thomas, co-chairman of the Wisconsin Hospital Emergency Preparedness Program (WHEPP) leadership committee. “This is one way for family and friends and everyone to keep track of these patients. They don’t have to have a lot of known information.”
Emergency medical technicians place an armband on the patient that contains basic identifying information, such as gender and approximate age. The band is read by a scanner, and the information can be used to track patients as they receive care.
In late July, Norwegian police arrested a man suspected of carrying out a pair of attacks on an Oslo government complex and an island summer camp that killed at least 92 people. In May, a tornado ripped through Joplin, Mo., killing 132 and leaving the status of 1,500 survivors unknown for days.
Fine-Tuning the System
In 2010, the Wisconsin DHS conducted an initial pilot of the system in conjunction with two emergency medical services units and a Milwaukee-area hospital that received and processed the information. That pilot, conducted in summer 2010 in a metropolitan area, tested the feasibility of the system. “We’ll have a better idea of how this upload feature works in more remote areas,” said Dave Seebart, project coordinator for WHEPP region three . “Everything we learn from this pilot will help us fine-tune the system before it’s rolled out across the state and recommended as a good way to do patient tracking.”
The statewide pilot is expected to begin in the next month or so and run through the fiscal year 2011. In that time, several exercises are scheduled in each region to thoroughly test the system before WHEPP recommends that it be implemented in the state’s 136 hospitals for implementation.
“None of this is mandatory,” Seebart said. “We’re looking for cooperative effort, and we want to give them as good a system as we can in hopes that they agree with us that it is a good system and incorporate it.”
The patient tracking system under consideration is part of WI-Trac, the resource tracking, alerting and communication system, used by hospitals, public health and other responders in the state during emergencies. WI-Trac is used for inter-hospital communication, to determine bed capacity and request resources.
WI-Trac has aided in the responses to a number of large-scale disasters, including the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, when it was used to locate a particular kind of ventilator needed by a patient in a Green Bay hospital. The hospital queried nearby hospitals using WI-Trac and received three responses within 15 minutes from hospitals that possessed the requested equipment. This saved the hospital in Green Bay from having to commit staff to call each of the nearby hospitals and inquire about the ventilator.
Hospitals in the state have also recently implemented a system, called Send Word Now, that allows them to reach staff in case of an incident through multiple modes of communication with a single broadcast. The system tracks staff members’ responses and also updates them when the need has been filled.
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