The Joint Advisory Committee (JAC) released a Report to Congress that commented about the DREAMS™ EMS Emergency Ambulance Telemedicine System pursuant to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act.
The Joint Advisory Committee on Communications Capabilities of Emergency Medical and Public Health Care Facilities (Joint Advisory Committee) was established by the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, U.S. Department of Commerce pursuant to the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The Joint Advisory Committee’s mission is to examine the communications capabilities and needs of emergency medical and public health care facilities.
The Committee released a Report to Congress dated February 4, 2008. The report details the status of communications systems for EMS and health care systems and possible technologies that may be utilized to advance beyond the current state of most communications.
The report commented about the accomplishments of DREAMS™:
“In Texas, they put their digital dreams on the road. The DREAMS™ (Disaster Relief and Emergency Medical Services) effort links medics in the field with doctors in the emergency room. This digital EMS system includes a high tech interactive digital ambulance. The program develops and tests a variety of telemedicine and telecommunications technologies that feature real time remote monitoring of patients who are in locations where hospital care is not readily available. These technologies are being designed to offer emergency medical care in rural areas, on the battlefield, and in disaster areas.
The program has resulted in numerous accomplishments, discoveries, and improvements. These digital ambulances – capable of communicating with voice, video, or text can deliver high quality video and real time patient data to the remote ER physician, greatly enhancing the physician’s situational awareness in the ambulance to support the medical decision making process.
The ambulance hardware integrates communications systems with commercial, off the shelf medical and computer devices such as digital video cameras, GPS navigation systems, rugged laptops, signature pads, bar code scanners, vital signs monitors, 12 lead EKGs, portable blood analyzers, ultrasounds and more.
The system allows the ER physician to receive video, audio, real time medical data, and text from the ambulance and transmit audio, text, and video annotations to the ambulance. The ER physician can remotely control the multiple video cameras in the ambulance to pan, tilt, or zoom to view the patient’s injuries. With colored, on screen markers, the physician can coach the EMTs through treatment that extends beyond normal EMS protocols.
To make it all possible, they combine multiple low bandwidth communications systems like cell phones, satellite phones, and data radios in order to produce enough bandwidth to send things like video.”
view full version of JAC Committee report..