Month: November 2021

For Coffey County Hospital in Burlington, Kansas, the stress of COVID-19 is all too real. With no ICU unit, the hospital needs to transfer patients to surrounding hospitals — a task that can sometimes take hundreds of calls for a single patient. The difficulty of finding available beds and coordinating patient transfer highlights the need for software for Motient’s Mission Control, which can share the availability of ICU beds in real-time and help arrange the most efficient mode of patient movement. 

To learn more about the struggles rural hospitals like Coffey County Hospital are facing—and how Mission Control can help — read the full article. 

In a recent podcast, Motient co-founder Dr. Richard Watson details how his company’s Mission Control platform is helping rural hospitals improve patient movement — and raising the quality of care and increasing sustainability as a result. 

To learn more about the impact of movement on patient outcomes, read the podcast transcript. 

Data collected from Motient’s Mission Control software highlights the importance of vaccination: The highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19 has infected more than 1,000 Kansans per day for the past 2 months. As a result, the lack of available beds is leading to hard conversations about if (and how) to ration medical care. 

To learn more about what the data from Mission Control shows, read the full article. 

Kansas doctors say they’re seeing more deaths from severe coronavirus infection, with year-over-year mortality rising from 1.8-2% to 2.5-5%. To provide patients with the appropriate level of care and lower this increase in mortality, healthcare providers need tools to locate beds and oversee patient transfers as efficiently as possible, a process that currently takes 12 hours on average.  

To learn how healthcare workers can close that 12-hour window and help patients receive critical care faster, read the full article. 

According to the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, more than 150,000 deaths are the result of injury each year in the United States. In fact, physical trauma is the number one cause of death for people 45 years old and younger.1 So, what can healthcare providers do to improve outcomes for trauma patients and drive this yearly death rate down, especially in rural areas?

While there are many factors in any given traumatic injury that can ultimately contribute to a patient’s death – for example, the existing heart disease of someone who sustained a severe electrical shock – there are two critical factors that are consistently present in every life-threatening trauma that also plays a role in impacting patient outcome:

• Proximity to an appropriate trauma center
• The efficiency in which a sending hospital initiates, oversees, and completes patient transfer

To better understand how healthcare providers can gain more control over these two factors and help improve the outcomes of their trauma patients, we need to first understand the footprint of American’s Trauma Center Network.

Navigating the Trauma Center network

There’s an expansive network of trauma centers throughout the US, with each center designated as Level I, Level II, Level III, Level IV, or Level V. The criteria that determine a trauma center’s level vary from state to state, but generally a Level I Trauma Center can provide total care for the most critical injuries, while a Level V Trauma Center can offer basic emergency department services and has trauma nurse(s) and physicians available upon a patient’s arrival.2

Rural states, however, tend to have fewer Level I Trauma Centers. Additionally, rural hospitals that are a part of the trauma network are usually more spread out across greater geographic distances than those in urban areas. For example, Montana is the fourth largest state with over 145,000 square miles of land,3 yet it has no designated Level I Trauma Centers. (It does have 4 Level II Trauma Centers and 3 Level III Trauma Centers.)4

So, if an EMS team brings a trauma patient to a Level III Trauma Center in Montana for stabilization, but the hospital determines the patient needs the care of at least a Level II Trauma Center, then there’s little time to waste in coordinating patient transfer.

Fortunately, with a greater insight into which surrounding hospital is most capable of providing the necessary level of care (weighed against geographic distance, patient condition, and other variables), plus the ability to designate the mode of transport and oversee patient movement in an efficient manner, the sending hospital can efficiently and rapidly manage and oversee every aspect of the patient’s transfer to a Level II Trauma Center.

Improving trauma outcomes with Mission Control

With Mission Control, Motient’s SaaS platform, healthcare providers in or out of the Trauma Center network can coordinate the most appropriate and efficient transport possible for stabilized patients.

Sending hospitals in rural areas can use Mission Control to gain real-time insight into the capabilities and capacities of surrounding Trauma Centers. Informed by their own patient assessment and guided by the previously inaccessible data delivered to them via Mission Control, healthcare providers can better ensure that trauma patients receive the appropriate care they need as fast as possible. Mission Control helps them to rapidly determine the receiving hospital most likely to optimize a patient outcome, arrange the appropriate ground or air transport, and coordinate with all stakeholders – from EMS teams to the receiving hospital – seamlessly and in real-time, every step of the way.

Learn more about how Mission Control can help you improve patient outcomes for trauma victims – and let’s work together to bring down the national death rate.

Sources

1. Trauma Facts
2. Trauma Center Levels Explained
3. Size of States
4. Trauma Centers

30% of healthcare workers are considering leaving the profession due to pandemic-related stress. As the Delta variant surges on, we understand trauma for healthcare providers isn’t over, but we are hopeful that technology can make a small impact in lightening the load for our frontline heroes. 

To learn how technology can help alleviate stress for healthcare workers, read the full article.