Complete and Resilient Documentation for Operational Medical Environments Leveraging Mobile Hands-free Technology in a Systems Approach: Experimental Study.

BACKGROUND: Prehospitalization documentation is a challenging task and prone to loss of information, as paramedics operate under disruptive environments requiring their constant attention to the patients. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to develop a mobile platform for hands-free prehospitalization documentation to assist first responders in operational medical environments by aggregating all existing solutions for noise resiliency and domain adaptation. METHODS: The platform was built to extract meaningful medical information from the real-time audio streaming at the point of injury and transmit complete documentation to a field hospital prior to patient arrival. To this end, the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) solutions with the following modular improvements were thoroughly explored: noise-resilient ASR, multi-style training, customized lexicon, and speech enhancement. The development of the platform was strictly guided by qualitative research and simulation-based evaluation to address the relevant challenges through progressive improvements at every process step of the end-to-end solution. The primary performance metrics included medical word error rate (WER) in machine-transcribed text output and an F1 score calculated by comparing the autogenerated documentation to manual documentation by physicians. RESULTS: The total number of 15,139 individual words necessary for completing the documentation were identified from all conversations that occurred during the physician-supervised simulation drills. The baseline model presented a suboptimal performance with a WER of 69.85% and an F1 score of 0.611. The noise-resilient ASR, multi-style training, and customized lexicon improved the overall performance; the finalized platform achieved a medical WER of 33.3% and an F1 score of 0.81 when compared to manual documentation. The speech enhancement degraded performance with medical WER increased from 33.3% to 46.33% and the corresponding F1 score decreased from 0.81 to 0.78. All changes in performance were statistically significant (P<.001). CONCLUSIONS: This study presented a fully functional mobile platform for hands-free prehospitalization documentation in operational medical environments and lessons learned from its implementation.

Utilization of Mobile Integrated Health Providers During a Flood Disaster in South Carolina (USA).

As health care systems in the United States have become pressured to provide greater value, they have embraced the adoption of innovative population health solutions. One of these initiatives utilizes prehospital personnel in the community as an extension of the traditional health care system. These programs have been labeled as Community Paramedicine (CP) and Mobile Integrated Health (MIH). While variation exists amongst these programs, generally efforts are targeted at individuals with high rates of health care utilization. By assisting with chronic disease management and addressing the social determinants of health care, these programs have been effective in decreasing Emergency Medical Services (EMS) utilization, emergency department visits, and hospital admissions for enrolled patients.The actual training, roles, and structure of these programs vary according to state oversight and community needs, and while numerous reports describe the novel role these teams play in population health, their utilization during a disaster response has not been previously described. This report describes a major flooding event in October 2015 in Columbia, South Carolina (USA). While typical disaster mitigation and response efforts were employed, it became clear during the response that the MIH providers were well-equipped to assist with unique patient and public health needs. Given their already well-established connections with various community health providers and social assistance resources, the MIH team was able to reconnect patients with lost medications and durable medical equipment, connect patients with alternative housing options, and arrange access to outpatient resources for management of chronic illness.Mobile integrated health teams are a potentially effective resource in a disaster response, given their connections with a variety of community resources along with a unique combination of training in both disease management and social determinants of health. As roles for these providers are more clearly defined and training curricula become more developed, there appears to be a unique role for these providers in mitigating morbidity and decreasing costs in the post-disaster response. Training in basic disaster response needs should be incorporated into the curricula and community disaster planning should identify how these providers may be able to benefit their local communities.Gainey CE, Brown HA, Gerard WC. Utilization of mobile integrated health providers during a flood disaster in South Carolina (USA). Prehosp Disaster Med. 2018;33(4):432-435.