Birmingham, AL - As the second anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the only operational early-alert system for biological and chemical terrorism events is the LifeTrac Bio/Chem system in Birmingham, Alabama.
“The threat of biological and chemical terrorism is still very much with us,” said Glenn Phillips, one of the developers of LifeTrac. “However, other bio/chem alert systems under development are designed to only identify an event long after it’s happened and spread significantly,” said Phillips. “Our system identifies such a threat far earlier and has the potential to save many more lives.”
Unlike systems that link data from lab results, LifeTrac tracks data from earlier in the chain of events.
“It takes a lot of time to get diagnoses and lab results,” said Joe Acker, executive director of the Birmingham Regional Emergency Medical Services System. “The potential for casualties is significant unless there is the earliest possible detection.” LifeTrac is not dependent on an exact patient diagnosis or specific identification of the agent.
LifeTrac Bio/Chem works by monitoring hospital resource availability trends, which are a reflection of changing patient loads, whether they are the result of natural phenomena or caused by biological or chemical terrorism. Upon detection of unusually high demands on hospital resources, LifeTrac immediately triggers an investigatory procedure which can uncover a bio/chem event early in its development.
In the event of an act of terrorism that induces immediate mass casualties —such as the attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon — LifeTrac provides an additional life-saving function: coordinating the routing of trauma patients to multiple trauma centers.
“In incidents of mass casualty, LifeTrac helps distributes the patient load to multiple hospitals, preventing overload at the emergency departments located nearest a mass casualty incident, helping ensure that more patients rapidly receive the most appropriate care,” Phillips said.
LifeTrac picks up where 911 service stops, giving paramedics real-time status of area trauma resources and acting as a routing-decision tool to minimize transport time and overcrowding. An academic study article in the journal American Surgeon reports that LifeTrac played a significant role in reducing mortality for trauma patients by 35% and the average length of stay in intensive care by almost 40%. To date, LifeTrac has successfully assisted with more than 17,000 patients in the six-county Birmingham area. LifeTrac Bio/Chem has been fully operational since August 2002.
LifeTrac was developed in a public/private partnership between the Birmingham Regional Emergency Medical Services System and Phillips’ software development firm, Forté Incorporated. LifeTrac currently covers six counties and 13 emergency medical departments in the Birmingham, Alabama metro area.