The 44th Medical Brigade and Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina https://www.wamc.amedd.army.mil are testing the “Medical hands-free Unified Broadcast” (MEDHUB) system. This system uses wearable sensors, accelerometers, and other technology cleared by FDA to improve the communication flow between patients, medics, and field hospitals when receiving patients.
According to Maj. Rosie Bennett, Chief Nurse at the Department of Emergency Medicine at Womack, “The Army has to have tight security within our networks so that technology currently being used in civilian emergency departments are not always feasible to use in the Army.”
MEDHUB is a joint project being developed with the Army Medical Materiel Agency https://www.usamma.army.mil and the Army Medical Materiel Development Activity, both within the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.
Transport Telemedicine Product Manager Jay Wang said, “MEDHUB is really about life-saving situational awareness. The system is designed to give receiving medical teams more information so they can better prepare for incoming patients by gathering the necessary staff and supplies.
Medics are often caring for multiple patients and have limited bandwidth to radio ahead to hospitals and provide the hospitals with the information needed on patients that are on the way to the hospital.”
MEDHUB’s suite of technology autonomously collects, stores, and transmits non-personally identifiable patient information from a device such as a hand-held tablet and transmits the information to the receiving field hospital via existing long-range DOD communication system. The information is then displayed on a large screen so clinicians can see what is inbound, including the number of patients and their vital statistics.
Wang and his team have been around the globe demonstrating MEDHUB to military leadership, potential end-users and civilian applications in private industry. Wang reports “The team will continue to test the system with users and are on track for wider DOD use by late 2019.