Making Connections, Growing Relationships

TeleCon18 Day Two Recap: Making Connections

The excitement level stayed high as day two of TeleCon18 kicked off with an inspiriting presentation by Eric Epley, Executive Director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC).  Operating with the mission to reduce death and disability related to trauma, disaster and acute illness through the implementation of well-planned and coordinated regional emergency response system, STRAC serves 22 counties in the San Antonio area, encompassing 26,000 square miles and 2.4 million people.

Eric shared that during Hurricane Harvey last year, the STRAC team had two days to prepare for a storm that ended up lasting five and deluged the area with the highest amount of rain on record in the United States. The rescue effort involved more than 500+ medical personnel, 13 ambulance buses, 100 state ambulances, 206 federal ambulances, 60 staging personnel, four mobile field hospitals, 43 medical incident support teams and two aeromedical staging teams.  Working together, these teams completed   1016 missions and 3244 medical evacuations.

STRAC is also responsible for a centralized system that monitors transfer requests, pending transports and transfers in progress for health systems during emergency situations.  This makes it possible for all involved parties to have full visibility and transparency when speed is of the essence. Related to visibility, area EMS providers have a practice of using patient ID badges to identify patients—STRAC used these during Hurricane Harvey proving the benefit that they have in tracking patients during a disaster. 

One of the assets STRAC has available for deployment during events like Hurricane Harvey is the AmBus, an ambulance bus, capable of caring for up to 20 patients at a time and making it possible to provide patients with rapid access to care and health systems with help in responding to emergency situations.  The AmBus was on display and available for tours to all TeleCon attendees—who were all definitely impressed!

Next up was Jeanne Iasella, Vice President, Product Management who provided an update on TeleTracking’s portfolio, along with a product roadmap preview.  Jeanne reiterated the commitment to our mission – to ensure that no one waits for the care they need.  And that means two things:

1. We are relentless in removing every barrier between patients and caregivers.
2. Once the patients reach caregivers, we work to ensure they can spend more time in care, and less time in administration.

That’s what TeleTracking was about in 1991. That’s what it is about today. 

And that’s where there are ambitious plans to expand that legacy in the future.  That’s also why TeleTracking has developed five solutions that span the healthcare continuum in the last 18 months—Community Scheduling and Workflow, Transfer Center IQ, On-Call Scheduling, new Mobile Apps and Community Placement.  The future includes Synapse IQ―an advanced analytics platform that supports the entire portfolio which offers timely and actionable data, bringing situation awareness; integration with the best practices and benchmarks.  Jeanne also shared TeleTracking’s updated release strategy―providing greater flexibility with upgrades, smaller more frequent updates, faster cycle times and increased roadmap transparency.

Throughout the afternoon, poster presenters shared their work and provided insight for others; there were 200 level product bootcamp sessions; client success stories and a continuation of portfolio updates.  The Command Center, Innovation Lab and TeleBar continued to go strong and draw standing room only crowds!