Emergency medical services: the frontier in health information exchange.

Emergency medical service (EMS) providers routinely lack even basic access to pre-existing patient information when delivering patient care in the field. Improving access to pre-existing patient information could improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care that they can deliver. EMS providers in Indianapolis use an electronic record to document their care. In order to provide access to pre-existing patient information, we integrated the EMS electronic record into the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) --an operational statewide health information exchange (HIE). Over a six month study period, there were 28,986 911 calls to EMS, with 4,332 (16%) requests for patient data. Of the 58 medics surveyed, a substantial majority felt the information delivered was an important tool for delivering quality patient care.