A mobile app created by University of Iowa researchers may help save lives by relaying car crash details to hospital doctors more quickly.
With the click of just a few buttons on a smartphone, the app, called TraumaHawk, enables state troopers to share photos and information from a crash scene with trauma doctors long before a patient arrives in the emergency room.
Thirty-five Iowa State Troopers are testing an early prototype, and those involved say the app is already improving communication between trauma doctors and first responders—doubling the amount of time doctors have to prepare.
"Prior to this, state troopers didn't really have much of a role in patient care," says Chris Buresh, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and TraumaHawk researcher. "But with this app, law enforcement and emergency medical technicians are talking to each other and helping doctors back in the emergency room understand what happened at the scene, how the patient sustained injuries, and what injuries we have to be especially vigilant for."
UI researchers say the app is a first step toward improving outcomes for car crashes, which kill roughly 33,000 people in the U.S. each year.
Beaming data to doctors
Say, for example, a car is damaged in a side-impact crash on the interstate. An Iowa State Trooper arrives, secures the scene, and opens the TraumaHawk app.
Screenshots of TraumaHawk show how the app guides first responders through entering detailed information about a crash scene, including the type of crash, the number and location of occupants, and how to take photos from various angles.
TraumaHawk guides the trooper through taking photos from various angles and prompts the trooper to enter information about the type of crash and whether the airbags deployed. The data is beamed to an iPad located in the emergency room.
When an alert comes in on the iPad, the charge nurse notifies the attending physician that images are available and the doctor logs into a secure email account where photos and details from the scene can be analyzed.
Buresh says viewing the way a passenger compartment has been damaged in a crash is helpful when trying to anticipate a patient's injuries.
"If it's a high side-impact crash, the driver's side door is pushed way in, you know that you're going to be dealing with left-side shoulder and chest injuries. If it's lower, you can almost guarantee you'll have some kind of pelvic or lower leg injury," Buresh says.
"Being able to create that mental model in your head, as a physician, of the sort of forces the patient probably experienced really helps you focus your exam."
A photo taken with TraumaHawk shows intrusion into the occupant compartment of the vehicle from another angle (left). This intrusion matched the resulting fracture of a tibia and fibula bone in the occupant’s leg (right).
Closing the information gap
In a study of 32 TraumaHawk cases spanning from October 2013 to June 2014, researchers examined how much time it took for information to flow between first responders and hospital doctors before a patient arrived in the emergency room.
Preliminary results show that when TraumaHawk is not used to communicate, doctors have about 12 minutes of lead-time to prepare for a crash victim. But, when TraumaHawk is used, that lead time is more than doubled, providing doctors with patient details and photos an average of 26 minutes before a crash victim arrives.
Dan McGehee, project principal investigator and director of the Human Factors and Vehicle Safety Research Division at the UI Public Policy Center, says those extra minutes give trauma staff more time to assemble a team and ensure the appropriate doctors are on hand to treat injuries.
Building safer vehicles
McGehee says data collected by the app could eventually help the automotive industry design vehicles in a way that might reduce the severity of injuries when a crash occurs, or prevent crashes all together by notifying a driver is a crash is imminent.
"If we better understand how your hips fit into the seat relative to the center armrest console, then we can help engineer center consoles that break away," McGehee says.
The ultimate goal is to make driving as safe as possible, the researchers contend.
"Eventually, we'd love to see a day where there are no traffic deaths in the state of Iowa, and I think that's a pretty long-term goal, but this is a good step in that direction," Buresh says.
The research is funded by the Iowa Department of Transportation. The app was developed by Denise Szecsei of the UI's computer science department.