Informatics in Prehospital Care

Abstract

The importance of informatics in the prehospital setting is just emerging as the driving forces change within the emergency medical services (EMS) industry. Modern EMS has its roots in battlefield emergency care and related experiences of the Korean and Vietnam wars. During the early 1960s and 1970s, the EMS mission was to strive to provide advanced emergency trauma and cardiac care to the public regardless of cost. The media and television sitcoms heightened the public’s awareness of “paramedicine.” Ideas based largely on anecdotal and deductive reasoning led to the prehospital application of emergency care techniques previously confined to the hospital emergency room. EMS services proliferated and ran the spectrum from small rural volunteer fire departments to large for-profit, big city private EMS providers. However, because the focus was on filling a void in the cascade of patient care, the need for data and information collection was not fully recognized until two to three decades later. Our society has evolved to a high level of medical sophistication and performance expectations and, as a result, informatics is essential for surviving in today’s changing EMS world.