A novel resource management approach for paramedic triage systems

Information technology is increasingly being used in healthcare paramedic sector with the goal to improve management of resources and enhance medical services to save lives. In this paper, we introduce EMTriage, a distributed Android application with the ability to access patients EHR's, and depending on the data and inputs, assess and distribute an acuity level to patients in need of resources. We use the Emergency Severe Index, a proven triage tool to set acuity level so paramedics know who to attend to first. We also introduce functionality such as, patients emailing their primary care doctors, directions to their closet hospital, access to information about diagnosing yourself, and an emergency warning system to inform people that you need help. Our solution provides client platform security and appropriately combines this with network security concepts. Moreover, we discuss further open problems and research challenges on security, privacy and usability of e-health cloud systems.