Healthcare technology: Seamlessly connecting ambulances and hospitals

Applications and application architecture are definitely mission-critical when there are lives on the line. During those crucial moments between arriving on-site at an emergency and delivering a patient to the hospital there is a small window of opportunity that can make the difference between life and death. The critical element that can make the balance swing one way or the other: Data.

Daniele Angeli, founder and CEO of MOLO17, kicked off his recent presentation at Couchbase CONNECT, by pointing out some of the challenges of emergency medical situations. He focuses on the lack of information that’s available on-site, in the field to emergency personnel, as well as the urgent need to get any detailed data that’s being gathered on-site quickly, securely, and accurately delivered to doctors and other specialists at the receiving hospital. Armed with real-time data, emergency and hospital personnel can work together to change outcomes.

Although the technical requirements for a mobile emergency communications application may be complex, Daniele argues that the value proposition is really pretty simple. If you take life-saving decisions available from medical specialists, enrich them with data shared in real-time from the first-responders and then coordinate access to medical IoT data by both teams, you get better outcomes.

The challenge before them was to build, test, and deploy a solution in 5 months! MOLO17, already an experienced Couchbase partner, realized that they were going to need to pull in best-of-breed technology products that were well understood, reliable, and easy to use and configure if they were going to meet their goal. Daniele’s presentation explores the system architecture in detail, discussing how Couchbase Mobile, installed on ruggedized Android tablets, is the starting point for aggregating the on-site medical IoT data and getting it into the hands of the specialists at the hospital. By using Couchbase Mobile as the real-time coordinating platform via a rugged mission-critical UX, with Couchbase Sync Gateway, Couchbase Server, AWS, Kubernetes and other cloud technologies, MOLO17 was able to deliver a functioning, fully integrated solution in record time.

Because communications between an ambulance and the hospital can often be erratic, a ruggedized application must have an “offline first” approach to UX (user experience). In other words, regardless of the quality or speed of the communications, both the emergency and hospital personnel needed to have a highly responsive UI that provides the most up-to-date data, as soon as it became available. Klunky, difficult to use interfaces were not going to solve the problem.

But the proof is in the pudding, right? When medical personnel first started using the completed application, their reaction was, “This is amazing. It’s magic!” because both the emergency and hospital teams were literally seeing and sharing the same data virtually at the same time.

Daniele wraps up his presentation by discussing future directions for the application, including more medical IoT devices, as well as the incorporation of embedded ML and AI for real time predictive analytics based on the data that is being captured and shared. A truly intriguing roadmap that will continue to improve patient outcomes, especially when they need it most.

For more details, please see Daniele’s presentation here.