EMS Interoperability Solutions, published by IHE Patient Care Coordination Technical Committee. This is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.1.1-current). This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/IHE/EMS-Overall/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Use Case: Routine Interfacility Patient Transport

When an ambulance transport from one hospital to another takes place, there is information that needs to be recorded into the ambulance’s patient care report, needed for patient care, that is not electronically available to the transport team. Much of the information is currently available in standard formats in electronic discharge summaries used in US, Canadian, and European healthcare settings using the HL7 CDA®3 Release 2.0 Standard. Other standards, such as HL7 FHIR, could also be used to communicate this information between the discharging hospital and the ambulance. The way that the ambulance is contacted for the transport is out of the scope of this profile.

The use of electronic transfer summaries benefits both hospitals and ambulances by decreasing staff time used to communicate such information, and hospitals will further benefit in reduced patient wait times for transfers and increased bed availability that could result from the time-efficient transfer of information. IHE is an excellent venue to solve this problem because it already has substantial experience with the standards that will be used, the necessary content, and CDA-based discharge summaries (e.g., MS XPHR). IHE will also provide a mechanism for ambulance and hospital system vendors to establish and test a solution. Much of the content is already in the current, real-world, EMR systems in hospitals and patient care facilities. This is regularly used when a patient is being transferred from a hospital into a rehabilitation facility, where patient information is electronically sent to the facility that the patient is going to go into. This system can be reused to fulfill ambulance transport system information needs.

Figure: Use Case 2 Process Flow