NCT02617875

Telemedical Support for Prehospital Emergency Medical Service

Telemedical Support for Prehospital Emergency Medical Service - a Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 3,534 (actual)
• Sponsor: RWTH Aachen University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and quality of a pre-hospital holistic multifunctional teleconsultation system. This system consists of on-line transmissions of vital parameters, audio- and video-signals from the scene to a telemedicine centre, where a trained emergency physician (tele-EMS physician) uses software-based guideline conform algorithms for diagnosis and treatment. At the prehospital emergency scene half of the patients will receive this telemedicine-based approach and the other half the conventional emergency physician-based care.

Detailed description

The usual Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in Germany consists of a dual system with two paramedics and one EMS physician on scene. Telemedicine networks between medical personnel and medical experts were shown to be beneficial for the quality of health care in many medical fields. The investigators have developed a holistic multifunctional mobile EMS teleconsultation system, as a complementary structural element to the ground based and air based EMS. This tele emergency system was evaluated and implemented during two third-party funded telemedicine projects (Med-on-@ix and TemRas) in the city of Aachen, Germany. The EMS teleconsultation system was step-wise introduced in the clinical routine of Aachen. Several cases (hypertensive emergency cases, stroke, dislocated fractures etc.) with the primary indication for an EMS physician are already dispatched solely to the paramedics, who can demand support by a tele-EMS physician at any time. Our aim is to demonstrate that the tele-EMS system is non-inferior in comparison to the conventional german EMS physician system with respect to safety. Moreover, the investigators want to evaluate which system provides a better quality with respect to recording important aspects of medical history and a more guideline conform treatment.

Conditions

• Emergency

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	conventional EMS physician	A physically present conventional EMS physician on scene, will treat the patients according to the standard operating procedures.
OTHER	tele-EMS physician	The patients will be treated by the paramedics, which are concurrently instructed by the tele-EMS physicians of the tele consultation center according to the software-based guideline conform algorithms for diagnosis and treatment.

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-07-09
• Primary completion: 2019-09-06
• Completion: 2019-12-18
• First posted: 2015-12-01
• Last updated: 2020-10-09

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Germany