Please complain below! Need ideas for creating an EMS app to ease EMS workload

[Grabshell]

Hi All,

I just created this account this week, so please bear with me if I'm missing any basic formalities.

My name is JP, and I'm currently a (hopeful) pre-med college undergrad with a background in EMS. I'm a licensed EMT-B and have been in the field for a couple years now. 

With that being said, I find myself in a comp sci-dominated school despite my desire to pursue the hard sciences. Consequently, many of my close friends and colleagues are studying computer science, and several of them specialize in mobile app design and development. We recently started discussing a possible project for creating an EMS app that could streamline, improve efficiency on any common pitfalls in the general EMS system.

So with that I ask you all to please complain about your EMS jobs/hobbies below! I'm surrounded by a group of very smart comp sci students eager to put their skills to the test on real world issues. Please let us try to help your everyday work life. I'm open to any and all comments, criticisms, or questions. Thank you for reading!

Best,

JP

 

 

[cekuriger]

Haha this is an impressive undertaking, you're a stronger one than me for doing it. Great idea, and thank you for doing it!

 

I work in a busy urban service. We'll get between 50 and 70 thousand calls per year with 13 ALS units on during the day, 3 BLS units on from 0700-2300, and 10 ALS units at night. 

I'm not one to gripe about dumb calls, I appreciate the easy tripsheets, but the level of EMS abuse we see is astronomical. 

i.e: Tooth Pain, Broken Toes, my kid has a cough and fever, and we were at the hospital today, and it's still there and I want him checked out again. 

Everyone deals with this stuff, I get it. In an 8 hour shift, it's not unlikely for us to get 6-7 calls for just my ambulance (what a lot of services get in 24 hours for 2 ambulances), and there are days were that's all of our calls, forcing our also high number of truly truly ill patients to wait another 15 minutes for one of our other ambulances to get there.

This is some thing, very obviously, NOT specific to my service, but shows a serious lack of education on what's ED appropriate and what's not, and when I try to explain that there's not much the ED can do, they get mad, tell me I'm lazy, blah, blah, blah, totally unaware of how much they are clogging up the system and hurting sick people. 

I think it would be cool to develop an app with common non-emergency complaints, and the person can select it, and be given more appropriate solutions, or, at what point with them (if there is any) that the patient should go to the hospital. 

The only big issue I see here, is I'm sure a lot of investors could be cautious with the liability aspect...but it never hurts to throw it out!!!