Friday, March 21, 2008

EPCR

At MVFD we now use EPCR (electronic patient contact reports) to document what we have done on a call. Most of us are of the mind set that the computer should be used for a wheel chock. We had a call last night for a man with trouble breathing. My Engineer was trying to get the computer to work while I was working up the patient. He got so frustrated because we (I had an EMT helping me) were firing off information to him faster than he could get it into the computer. He finally took the computer back to the engine and grabbed one of our trusty paper patient contact reports. Later on it only took me about an hour to get all the information transferred into the computer. The problem is that the programmers and no contact with the end users. The system is a nightmare to work. As for my patient...he was treated and sent off to the hospital, completely unaware of the problems that we had.

1 comment:

  1. Maybe you should look into other products. I know that our ambulance service uses an ePCR product and it was actually built from the street up (by Paramedics). I think that it works GREAT. A full ALS cardiac code takes about 8 minutes to document. But good luck with yours

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