The City of New Orleans Emergency Medical Services agency has signed a $4 million contract with Affiliated Computer Services for an electronic patient records capture system.
Under terms of the five-year contract, ACS will equip all of New Orleans' ambulances with FIREHOUSE (FH) Mobile EMS software, which is designed to allow
EMS personnel to record patient data in real-time in the field, at a patient's side or in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
"This integration of FH Mobile EMS with ACS' FIREHOUSE software will provide New Orleans paramedics with a state-of-the-art system that will give them the ability to reach the patient faster, and treat, transport and document the incident seamlessly and more efficiently than ever before," said Louis Schiavone, ACS' vice president of public safety and justice systems.
The New Orleans EMS Department has used ACS for computer operations and data center management, quality and production control and auditing accounting and customer service since 1989. In 2003, ACS provided handheld computers for use on the city's ambulance units to help improve data collection procedures and ambulance response times.
ACS suffered a loss of key hardware during Hurricane Katrina, which temporarily returned them to a paper-based billing system until they could ship new equipment into the city.
"We look forward to stepping into a new future with ACS through the adoption of electronic patient care records and electronic billing, which will allow us to provide our city with the highest level of pre-hospital emergency medicine to-date," said Jullette Saussy, MD, director of EMS for the City of New Orleans. "For 19 years, ACS has continued to work with us side-by-side to ensure that our needs as a revenue-generating EMS agency are met while also remaining patient-care focused throughout the process."