Over 2,600 users in 1,300 organizations have access to biospatial analytics, reports, visualization, and alerts. On average, the number of EMS reports in the biospatial platform increases by about 87,000 events each day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has become a major focus of the State EMS offices, public health organizations, and EMS agencies that use biospatial. We are dedicated to making sure the tools we develop now will also apply to future public health emergencies. During March and April, users observed a decrease in EMS calls but an increase in cardiac arrest and out-of-hospital deaths. biospatial implemented several differential analysis tools to allow users to quickly compare syndrome trends to prior weeks, months, or years. These tools enable users to understand and demonstrate the stress being placed on EMS systems by analyzing call volumes, response times, transport times, and patient offload times.
In February, biospatial released our first COVID-19 syndrome definition. The COVID-19 syndrome definition was updated several times as we learned more about the disease and as documentation related to COVID-19 became more standardized. Related to COVID-19, biospatial worked with the states of Georgia, Illinois, and Michigan to develop a syndrome to identify possible Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). By user request, we also released eleven other new syndromes this year, including methamphetamine overdose, mental health, heat-related illness, firearm-assault, sexual violence, suicide attempt, suicide ideation, and two state-specific opioid overdose syndromes.
Our users continue to provide great ideas on how to increase the usefulness of the biospatial platform. This user feedback resulted in new and improved widgets, new performance measures, more ways to search and aggregate data, and completely new dashboards. For example, user feedback inspired development of the Demand Analysis widget, which provides analyses of the demand for EMS services for each hour of the day and day of week, and enhancement of the EMS Response Times widget, both of which led to a new Transport Dashboard. The Pediatric Dashboard was created to enable EMS for Children and other pediatric-focused users to have a specialized view of EMS contacts with children. biospatial released 12 major updates to the platform in 2020 – each packed with new features, capabilities, and bug-fixes – to the benefit of all users!
This year also provided new opportunities for biospatial. In the second half of 2020, the states of Florida and Illinois chose biospatial to serve as their state EMS data repository. Agencies in these states submit EMS records directly to biospatial. Furthermore, these same agencies have access to the biospatial application to review and analyze their data submissions. The repository services and the analytics platform are provided without charge to the partnering state EMS office and their constituent entities. To provide further value to state EMS offices in partnership with biospatial, biospatial now provides data exports to other endpoints, such as Health Information Exchanges and other governmental agencies.
biospatial wants to thank all our users for their input, partnership, and opportunity to serve. Our active user base is what has made the platform as robust and useful as it is. We look forward to the opportunities and ideas that will arise in 2021.
For more information about biospatial’s capabilities, please visit the company’s website at www.biospatial.io, email sales@biospatial.io or follow biospatial on LinkedIn