Abstract
German emergency medical services (EMS) face the challenge to ensure high-quality emergency care against a background of continuously increasing numbers of emergency missions, resource shortages concomitant with greatly increased arrival times, particularly in rural areas. Because German EMS physicians are at maximum capacity, an immediate response is not always possible and thus delays in commencing advanced life support measures sometimes occur. In such scenarios, paramedics start the initial treatment until the EMS physician arrives. The delayed availability of a physician can defer the decision process of the paramedics and thus postpone the start of the patient’s essential treatment, which is particularly dangerous during the care of cardiovascular emergencies. Therefore, the project TemRas (Telemedical Rescue Assistance System) has developed an innovative concept to improve quality of emergency care. The objective is to introduce so-called tele-EMS physicians providing remote medical support for the emergency team on site by transmitting audio and video data, as well as vital signs and 12-lead-ECG from the emergency site to a teleconsultation center. In this paper the development process as well as first results of the evaluation phase and the impact for further use of telemedicine in emergency medical services are presented.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Behrendt, H., R. Schmiedel, and K. Auerbach. 2009. Review of the performance of the rescue service in the Federal Republic of Germany in 2004 and 2005. German Interdisciplinary Journal of Emergency Medicine 12 (5): 383–388.
Schuster, M., M. Pints, and M. Fiege. 2010. Duration of mission time in prehospital emergency medicine: Effects of emergency severity and physicians level of education. Emergency Medicine Journal 27 (5): 398–403.
Adams, George L., Paul T. Campbell, John M. Adams, David G. Strauss, Karen Wall, Janet Patterson, Kathy B. Shuping, Charles Maynard, Dwayne Young, Craig Corey, Alan Thompson, Benjamin A. Lee, and Galen S. Wagner. 2006. Effectiveness of prehospital wireless transmission of electrocardiograms to a cardiologist via hand-held device for patients with acute myocardial infarction (from the Timely Intervention in Myocardial Emergency, NorthEast Experience [TIME-NE]). The American Journal of Cardiology 98 (9): 1160–1164.
Maria Sejersten, Martin Sillesen, Peter R. Hansen, Søren Loumann Nielsen, Henrik Nielsen, Sven Trautner, David Hampton, Galen S. Wagner, and Peter Clemmensen. 2008. Effect on treatment delay of prehospital teletransmission of 12-Lead electrocardiogram to a cardiologist for immediate triage and direct referral of patients with ST-segment elevation acute myocardial infarction to primary percutaneous coronary intervention. The American Journal of Cardiology 101 (7): 941–946.
Ziegler, V., A. Rashid, M. Müller-Gorchs, U. Kippnich, E. Hiermann, C. Kögerl, C. Holtmann, M. Siebler, and B. Griewing. 2008. Mobile computing systems in preclinical care of stroke. Results of the Stroke Angel initiative within the BMBF project PerCoMed. Anaesthesist 57 (7): 677–685.
Xiong, Wei, Aaron Bair, Christian Sandrock, Sophia Wang, Javeed Siddiqui, and Nathaniel Hupert. 2012. Implementing telemedicine in medical emergency response: Concept of operation for a regional telemedicine hub. Journal of Medical Systems 36 (3): 1651–1660.
Schneiders, Marie-Thérèse, Daniel Schilberg, and Sabina Jeschke. 2011. A Joint Organizational and Technical Development of a Telematic Rescue Assistance System for German Emergency Medical Services. eTELEMED 2011, The Third International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine, 150–155.
Protogerakis, Michael, Arno Gramatke, and Klaus Henning. 2009. A System Architecture for a Telematic Support System in Emergency Medical Services. 3rd International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (ICBBE 2009), 1–4.
Skorning, Max, Christian Herrmanns, Stefan Beckers, Daniel Rörtgen, Sebastian Bergrath, Michael Protogerakis, Tadeusz Brodziak, Jörg Brokmann, and Rolf Rossaint. 2009. Med-on-ix: Aachener Forschungsprojekt zur Verbesserung der Patientenversorgung in lebensbedrohlichen Situationen. In Telemedizinführer Deutschland, ed. A. Jäckel, vol vol. 10, 323–326. Bad-Nauenheim: Minerva.
Schneiders, M.-T, S. Herbst, D. Schilberg, I. Isenhardt, S. Jeschke, H. Fischermann, S. Bergrath, R. Rossaint, and M. Skorning. 2012. Telenotarzt auf dem Prüfstand: Evaluation des Projekts Med-on-ix aus Sicht der Rettungsassistenten. Notfall + Rettungsmedizin 15 (5): 410–415.
Rörtgen, Daniel, Sebastian Bergrath, Rolf Rossaint, Stefan K. Beckers, Harold Fischermann, In-Sik Na, David Peters, Christina Fitzner, and Max Skorning. 2013. Comparison of physician staffed emergency teams with paramedic teams assisted by telemedicine: A randomized, controlled simulation study. Resuscitation 84 (1): 85–92.
Meyer, Brett C., Rema Raman, Thomas Hemmen, Richard Obler, Justin A. Zivin, Ramesh Rao, Ronald G. Thomas, and Patrick D. Lyden. 2008. Efficacy of site-independent telemedicine in the STRokE DOC trial: A randomised, blinded, prospective study. The Lancet Neurology 7(9): 787–795.
Lin, Chin-Feng. 2012. Mobile telemedicine: A survey study. Journal of Medical Systems 36(2): 511–520.
(US) LifeBot DREAMS. The most advanced telemedicine systems. http://www.lifebot.us.com/dreams/. Accessed 27 Sept 2012.
(Denmark) Viewcare. Viewcare pre-hospital telemedicine system. http://viewcare.com/index.php/da/praehospital. Accessed 23 Oct 2013.
Thelen, Sebastian, Marie-Thérèse Schneiders, Daniel Schilberg, and Sabina Jeschke. 2013. A Multifunctional Telemedicine System for Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services. eTELEMED 2013, The Fifth International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine, 53–58.
Ian Sommerville. 2007. Software engineering. 8th ed. Pearson Education: Harlow, Essex.
Büscher, Christian, Harold Fischermann, Frederik Hirsch, Marie-Therese Schneiders, Jörg Christian Brokmann, Daniel Schilberg, and Sabina Jeschke. 2012. Standard operating procedures for telemedical care in emergency medical services. In Global telemedicine and eHealth updates: Knowledge resources, ed. M. Jordanova and F. Lievens, vol. 5, 292–296. Luxembourg.
Katzenmeier, Christian, and Stefania Slavu. 2009. E-Health in der Notfallmedizin: Rechtsgutachten: “Rechtsfragen des Einsatzes der Telemedizin im Rettungsdienst: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel des Forschungsprojektes Med-on-ix”. Köln.
Bergrath, Sebastian, Marie-Thérèse Schneiders, Frederik Hirsch, Bernd Siegers, Rolf Rossaint, Daniel Wielpütz, Michael Czaplik, Sebastian Thelen, Christian Büscher, Stefan K. Beckers, and Jörg C. Brokmann. 2012. Telemedizinische Unterstützung von Rettungsassistenten: erste Ergebnisse aus dem Forschungsprojekt TemRas. 1. Symposium ICT in der Notfallmedizin (NotIT 2012), 83–86.
Czaplik, Michael, Sebastian Bergrath, Rolf Rossaint, Sebastian Thelen, Tadeusz Brodziak, Bernd Valentin, Frederik Hirsch, Stefan K. Beckers, and Jörg C. Brokmann. 2014. Employment of telemedicine in emergency medicine: Clinical requirement analysis, system development and first test results. Methods of Information in Medicine 53 (2): 99–107.
Bergrath, Sebastian, Michael Czaplik, Rolf Rossaint, Frederik Hirsch, Stefan Beckers, Bernd Valentin, Daniel Wielpütz, Marie-Thérèse Schneiders, and Jörg Brokmann. 2013. Implementation phase of a multicentre prehospital telemedicine system to support paramedics: feasibility and possible limitations. Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine (SJTREM) 21 (1): 5–4.
Acknowledgement
This project is performed in collaboration among the RWTH Aachen University, the University Hospital Aachen, and the industrial partners P3 Communications GmbH, Philips Healthcare and 3M Medica. The project is co-funded by the European Union (ERDF – European Regional Development Fund – Investing in Your Future) and the German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), under the operational program “Regional Competitiveness and Employment” 2007–2013 (EFRE).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Büscher, C. et al. (2014). The Telemedical Rescue Assistance System “TemRas” – Development, First Results and Impact. In: Jeschke, S., Isenhardt, I., Hees, F., Henning, K. (eds) Automation, Communication and Cybernetics in Science and Engineering 2013/2014. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08816-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08816-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08815-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08816-7
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)