Schooley et al. A mHealth System for Patient Handover in EMS Proceedings of the 10 th International ISCRAM Conference – Baden-Baden, Germany, May 2013 T. Comes, F. Fiedrich, S. Fortier, J. Geldermann and T.Müller, eds. 188 A mHealth System for Patient Handover in Emergency Medical Services Benjamin Schooley University of South Carolina Ben.Schooley@sc.edu Abdullah Murad Claremont Graduate University abdullah.murad@cgu.edu Yousef Abed Claremont Graduate University Yousef.Abed@cgu.edu Thomas Horan Claremont Graduate University Tom.Horan@cgu.edu ABSTRACT This research uses multiple methods to investigate the use of an enterprise mobile multimedia information system aimed at improving handover of patient and emergency incident information from pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to hospital emergency department providers. A field study was conducted across EMS and hospital organizations in the Boise, Idaho region of the United States for three months to examine use of the system and to assess practitioner perspectives. Findings include perceived benefits and challenges to using digital audio recordings and digital pictures, captured using a smartphone application, for improving the timeliness, completeness, accuracy, convenience, and security of patient information for handover in EMS; limitations on how much data can be collected in the field due to a wide variety of contextual constraints; and a need to better understand the value of video within the EMS handover context. Keywords mHealth, emergency medical services, mobile computing, multimedia, information systems design theory. INTRODUCTION Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is an organized and collaborative effort between several organizations providing different levels or tiers of care designed to transport sick or injured patients to the hospital. Handover of patient information in EMS poses significant challenges. During an emergency medical incident, communication occurs between pre-hospital responders (paramedics) and emergency department (ED) staff prior to and/or during patient transport and arrival to the medical facility. This information exchange is essential to the decision making process for healthcare practitioners and for achieving positive health outcomes for patients (Aase, Soyland, and Hansen, 2011). Prior research has identified significant challenges to efficient, accurate, and complete information handover for communicating pre-hospital patient information to EDs for the purposes of point of care decision making including: 1) limited time for paramedics to collect and transmit data on-scene or en-route using electronic patient care record (ePCR) systems, 2) a limited number of tools in the field for paramedics to collect value-added multi-media information (Schooley et al., 2010), 3) often fragmented communications or lack of information exchange standards and practices (Aase et al. 2011), 4) significant reliance on the use of synchronous two-way voice radio communication technologies (Chu and Ganz, 2004), and 5) frequently missed, unreported, or incorrectly reported verbal or written information to the ED especially for more severe medical incidents. With the rapid advancement high-capability smartphones and mobile devices, many in industry and research are motivated to explore new approaches to collect and transmit voice, data, pictures, and video information to improve healthcare processes. The goal of this research was to explore the potential impact of an enterprise mobile multimedia information system to aid in EMS communications. This paper describes an application developed by the authors that enables pre-hospital emergency responders to capture and transmit digital images, video and digital audio about patients and related emergency incident information to the hospital prior to patient