JMIR mHealth and uHealth
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Feb 2015
An effective support system of emergency medical services with tablet computers.
There were over 5,000,000 ambulance dispatches during 2010 in Japan, and the time for transportation has been increasing, it took over 37 minutes from dispatch to the hospitals. A way to reduce transportation time by ambulance is to shorten the time of searching for an appropriate facility/hospital during the prehospital phase. Although the information system of medical institutions and emergency medical service (EMS) was established in 2003 in Saga Prefecture, Japan, it has not been utilized efficiently. The Saga Prefectural Government renewed the previous system in an effort to make it the real-time support system that can efficiently manage emergency demand and acceptance for the first time in Japan in April 2011. ⋯ The transportation time by ambulance was shorter following the implementation of the tablet computer in the current support system of EMS in Saga Prefecture, Japan. The cloud computing reduced the cost of the EMS system.