Electronic Health Records in Prehospital Care

Abstract

Documentation is an essential part and duty in all clinical settings. "ELGA" (short for "Elektronische Gesundheitsakte") is the Austrian Electronic Health Record and aims to support the process of clinical decision-making. However the use case of integrating ELGA to an out-of-hospital setting is not defined yet. This work explores the special requirements in prehospital care. The aim of research is to identify needed information and processes at the emergency scene to establish appropriate decisions about diagnosis, treatments and transport. Moreover the mentioned use case should be discussed by mapping available data fields in ELGA to the required data at scene. To satisfy the research goal an exploratory research using field work and expert interviews was done as well as a systematic analysis of findings. The results were analyzed with a thematic analysis approach and structured as flow charts, to illustrate the process, and as an Entity-Relationship-Model, to show the required data at scene mapped to available data fields in ELGA. It was possible to show that ELGA is suitable to serve several use cases in prehospital care.

Keywords: Ambulances; Documentation; Electronic Health Records; Emergency Medical Services; Patient Handoff.