Real Time Telephone Application Use for Consultation in Emergency Medical Services

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Emergency medical services (EMS) are an operation that requires speed and prompt decision-making to provide patients treatment and rescue them from crisis. A telephone application was created to be a communication channel. However, the effectiveness of EMS consulting via telephone application has not been well studied.
 AIM: The aim of this study was to describe the use of real-time telephone application use for consultation in EMS.
 METHODS: A cross-sectional, single EMS centered study at Srinagarind Hospital in Thailand. Data were gathered from LINE® Application under the name of “Current training EMKKU” and the EMS database throughout 2020-2021.
 RESULTS: A total of 11550 messages with 6221 general text; messages were not involved in patients’ consultant (53.86%). The consultation mostly took place during the afternoon shifts (4PM to 0AM) accounted for 45.11%. We found that Thursday (19.63%) was the day with most frequent consulting services, followed by Tuesday (16.05%) and Friday (16.03%) regarding the consultation. There were 45 active users in the LINE® Application under the name of “Current training EMKKU”. The mean age of the participants was 32.10±5.60 years, and 51.11% (n = 23) of them was female.
 CONCLUSIONS: The real-time telephone application is used for consultation related to patients' symptoms during EMS operations and ER patient care was most commonly in the afternoon and on Thursdays and Tuesdays.