Background Muleshoe is a town in Bailey County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Lubbock in the rural western part of the state Bailey County EMS recently began using swyMed’s DOT Telemedicine Backpack in their ambulances as part of the Next Gen 9-1-1 Telemedicine Project sponsored by Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center The Project goal is to deliver real-time video telemedicine over reliable connectivity from any location, regardless of how remote But this isn’t just a story about technology… October 31, 2017 Just a few days after the new system went live, Bailey County EMS responded to a “chest pain” call around 6pm at a patient’s home within the Muleshoe city limits EKG performed in the field showed that the patient was having a significant heart attack The local hospital, Muleshoe Area Medical Center, is not equipped to perform emergent cardiac interventions and standard EMS protocol would be to airlift the patient to the Heart Center in Lubbock Unfortunately, the patient said he preferred to stay close to home and under Texas law, if the patient can express a preference, that preference must be heeded The EMS crew knew that taking the patient where he wanted to go would waste precious time before he ultimately would be transferred to Lubbock The EMS crew called the ER in Muleshoe over swyMed’s video link, and the ER doctor spoke “face to face” with the patient in the ambulance and was able to convince the patient that medically the best place for him to go was Lubbock The patient agreed and five minutes later, a helicopter ambulance was landing to transport the patient to Lubbock Upon arrival at the Lubbock Heart & Surgical Hospital, the patient went into full cardiac arrest Fortunately, he was in the right place Lubbock had the resources to intervene The patient underwent cardiac catheterization to remove the blockage, was up and walking the next day and was home within a couple more Conclusions We often think of telemedicine as a system to enable doctors to take vital signs remotely; look in an ear, or down a throat and make, or potentially change, a diagnosis based on the virtual interaction with the patient In this case, we learned about an important but under-publicized benefit: the EMS crew had the tools (Zoll X-series EKG) and knew what the right decision was, but that wasn’t enough It took a personal “face to face” interaction with a Doctor to convince the patient to what was best for him In the critical moments when a life-changing decision was being made, putting a Doctor in the ambulance flipped the balance in favor of the patient surviving Not all telemedicine visits have such dramatic impact on a patient’s outcome, but arming first responders with mobile telemedicine technologies helps focus the best trained resources on the situations where they can make the most difference Having the ability to quickly and easily beam a Doctor into the ambulance reduced the stress on all participants and guided a high pressure situation to the best outcome by giving all parties the confidence that they were making the right decision About swyMed Time-critical mobile telemedicine consults require simple, fast and highly reliable connections While many solutions fail beyond the hard-wired four walls of a hospital, swyMed's patented technology expands telemedicine care to places where it was previously unavailable, powering truly mobile exceptional-quality live video encounters, even at the lowest bandwidths swyMed's proven, reliable, easy-to-use solutions, including the DOT Telemedicine Backpack, give care providers the ability to connect to doctors for real-time video telemedicine anytime, anywhere swyMed's innovative technology is used by providers for Remote Patient Evaluation (RPE), home health, EMS/critical transport, telestroke and Mobile Integrated Healthcare (MIH) programs in thousands of encounters throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East About Texas Tech University Health Science Center Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) is a seven-school university located in Abilene, Amarillo, Dallas/Fort Worth, El Paso, Lubbock, Midland and Odessa To date, TTUHSC has trained more than 10,000 health care professionals, meeting the health care needs of more than 2.5 million people who live throughout a vast 108-county area stretching from the Texas Panhandle south to the Permian Basin and west into Eastern New Mexico