ROBERTSON COUNTY, Texas -- First responders have just minutes to asses a situation and decide what action to take. During these medical emergencies,things move fast. A wrong measurement or dosage could have serious impacts.
Handtevy is coming to help.
"The system allows us to do the pre-planning after the call and walk away with a ton of confidence," said Executive Vice President Corey Ricketson.
The system takes the age and the weight of the patient and gives providers the exact measurement to give. This helps eliminate the need for mental math in these high-stress situations.
"It's hard to do math now, a few years out of high school and college," said Air Med 12 Supervisor Billy Rice. "Now attempt to do that same math in a ditch with a car flipped upside down with a patient screaming in pain."
Assistant EMT Director, Adam Gallagher, said the system helps lower the risk of human error.
"You don't want to make medication errors," he said. "You don't want to underdose and you don't want to overdose. So, by having it all laid out, knowing the concentration and the volume of the drug, you're taking that probability out."
The system also combines all the paperwork from beginning to end. From when a call is called into dispatch, to the different drugs administered to a patient, everything can be noted within Handtevy.
"I am able to get the critical details of what we're going to before I'm even there," Rice said. "The paramedics in the ambulance, the flight crew in the aircraft all have the ability to open the same checklist and see the same information. And from the time they land, the patient hand-off is seamless."
The hope with Handtevy is to put confidence back into the crews, so they can focus on the job they are there to do.
"You have to relieve the crews of the decisions they don't need to make so they can be safe and make critical decisions so someone else can have another day on the planet," Rice said.