LA County agencies awarded $1.7M for trauma care, info sharing

A pair of grants totaling more than $1.7 million were awarded to Los Angeles County health agencies in support of programs designed to improve emergency medical care and treatment of trauma patients in the field, county officials announced Wednesday.

According to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the state Office of Traffic Safety awarded a grant of just over $1 million to county Emergency Medical Services, Harbor-UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine and the Lundquist Institute. The money is earmarked for the development and implementation of a mobile app that can be accessed by paramedics and medical technicians in the field who respond to traumatic injuries, such as car crash patients.

The app is expected to provide personnel with more rapid access to medical treatment protocols in hopes it will lead to improved real-time decision-making in the field.

“For patients with severe trauma, immediate care on scene by paramedics is critical to their survival and recovery,” Dr. Nichole Bosson, Los Angeles County EMS Agency medical director, said in a statement. “This grant will place the most up-to-date, evidence-based practices into the hands of our EMS clinicians, quite literally, via a mobile application.”

County officials said information on essential treatment protocols are currently accessible through a county EMS Agency website, but the mobile app will make the information more readily available.

Meanwhile, the state Office of Traffic Safety also awarded the same three agencies a separate $700,902 grant to support a Health Data Exchange System, billed as an electronic data-sharing effort that is also expected to help improve trauma care.

“There’s currently no mechanism for capturing outcome data of all injured patients transported by EMS in Los Angeles County. This grant will facilitate real-time data sharing, which we can use to inform proactive measures to prevent injury, as well as to improve the field care for those patients injured in L.A. County,” Richard Tadeo, Los Angeles County EMS Agency director, said in a statement.

The HDE system will streamline the current manual system of collecting outcome data for trauma patients, officials said.

“HDE will not only capture injury patterns, it will also provide data that public health entities, municipalities, and law enforcement can draw from to develop solutions to prevent common traffic crashes and pedestrian injuries,” according to the county Department of Health Services.

Funding for both grants was provided through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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