Week 1 - MBA 6601 - AI in Prehospital Medicine

 As I already work in Medicine I found this week topic very interesting and eye opening about how much AI is already integrated into my job. For anyone that works in Healthcare knows that we practice medicine because it is always evolving and changing with new studies, methods, or ideas in the field. Some examples of AI that I used while at work just this past week is what my post is going to be orientated around. 

Prehospital medicine we interact with people for a lot of different reasons. One of the most frequent complaints that patients have I would say is chest pain. We carry monitors on every ambulance that can record the rhythm in the heart and preform a 12 lead which provides different views of the heart to look for a heart attack. This is important for the patient because we can transport to the correct hospital, activate the correct teams and decide if the patient needs lights and sirens or even a helicopter to get there very quickly. One thing that has changed in the past few years is the ability for any provider to obtain these 12 leads. Only a paramedic, nurse (prehospital), or doctor in theory could read these 12 leads. The monitor does a step further where they transmit the 12 lead to the doctors at the hospital we are transporting to, and (where the AI kicks in) they can read it themselves. Though with my experience it needs a lot of work, but they can correctly see a heart attack sometimes.

As mentioned in my first post the AI in our ventilators also play a very important role and large aspect of patient care. These ventilators are so efficient at controlling the airway of an intubated patient that once they are attached to it there is very little input needed from the provider. On critical patients this is very important and makes it easier to manage critical patients in an ambulance or helicopter. In both senecios there are only two providers (Nurse/Medic, Medic/EMT, sometimes Medic/Driver).

Even behind the scenes from what I see AI has a large factor in what I do in prehospital. When I worked on an ambulance for a county in South Carolina, AI would move the trucks to different street corners after data interpretations and call volumes. The system was so busy that we would rarely see a station. This was partly due to the 911 call volume but also moving around to maintain a well covered area to keep the response time as low as possible. This strategy was called dynamic deployment, and AI has made it more advanced and prevents lengthy calculations from needing to be done. 

AI plays a large role already in EMS (Prehospital Medicine) already. Though its been the field for a long time it still has large flaws that need to be worked out. With the interpreting the 12 leads it has a high false positive, but with ventilating the patient it works very well. We still need to give input these devices and adjust per our clinical knowledge but soon that could be changed.