Man. Time has been zipping by these past few days. Barely had a second to think.
I’m sitting in my living room, it’s Saturday morning. The blinds are slightly drawn. And I feel slightly hungover, a dull ache in my head. My mouth is dry. My whites are re-tumbling; they’ve been sitting in the dryer since Tuesday accumulating wrinkles.
I was at the conference again on Thursday — but due to a lack of good communication, I ended up driving just myself there in the minivan. It was cool though, it meant I got to use cruise control (which my car lacks), and that I got to blast great music the whole way there. Hertz includes satellite radio, pretty cool stuff.
The day itself was fantastic. There were some absolutely great speakers, including a presentation of Richmond, Virginia’s mind-blowing Emergency Medical Services. These guys are just nuts. They don’t keep their ambulances in hospitals or their own separate buildings, like you might expect. Instead, they’re continually redistributed into zones around the city, based on the statistical probability of their need in that area. It would be easy to think they’re slacking off, since it’s not unsual to see them at 7-11’s or McDonalds, when in reality they’re simply dead in the center of their zone. Average time between a help call and having someone on the scene? 4.5 minutes.
The amount of data these guys have on their area is impressive — 10 years worth if I remember correctly. Want to know what part of the city has the most cardiac arrests on a Friday night in a pub where the victim earns more than 30,000 a year? Their system will plot blue dots on a map of the region, allowing you to select areas and drill down as needed. If the number of incidents per minute are more than 2 standard deviations from the statistical average, the head supervisors for the EMS program are automatically paged by the system.
They’re producing an 80-lead (instead of the standard 12-lead) ECG. Instead of analyzing trouble spots in the waveforms, this thing produces a 3d representation of the body and does the interpretation for you, colourizing potential trouble spots. It’s wicked cool — makes the chances of missing a potential heart attack on the right side of the body and on the back much lower.
And those are just a couple examples. You can read more at the VCURES website. Incredible stuff these guys are doing. I wish I had a copy of the keynote to show you — Dr. Ornato was a fantastic speaker. None of what he said was fear-based hype and it easily could have been, given the topic was emergency medicine. Suppose it’s part of the difference first-hand experience makes. He and the VCURES team are making the lives of trauma victims better, in obvious, measurable ways. I think the whole conference found it inspirational. Gained my respect, that’s for sure.