Tom Bassing
The Birmingham Business Journal

Months before the Sept. 11 attack on America, Joe Acker had terrorism on his mind.

Specifically, the longtime executive director of the six-county Birmingham Regional Emergency Medical Services System was determined to be ready for any chemical or biological attack on the city and surrounding area.

He wondered: Could the computerized system the region has had in place since 1996 to efficiently route trauma patients to area hospitals be upgraded to quickly gather information on the mass arrival of patients exposed to a chemical or biological agent or a less sinister but nevertheless deadly organism such as E-coli?

He called Glenn Phillips, president of Forté Inc., the Birmingham-based software firm that developed the original system. "We began work on the project last summer and then met in the afternoon on Sept. 11 and said our schedule has been moved up," says Phillips.

"In the month after Sept. 11, I found story after story after story about homeland defense. The weak link always was how do all these hospitals communicate with each other. We had that link," Phillips adds.

After six weeks of testing, the system was inaugurated Wednesday (Aug. 21). It is an extension of the existing operation, which ties computers installed in 13 area emergency rooms to the Trauma Communications Center downtown. That $550,000 system, which began operating in 1996, was funded by the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Using Forté's software, a participating hospital can divert emergency crews when its ER is overloaded, saving critical time for seriously injured patients.

According to a study published in the February issue of The American Surgeon, the efficiency of the system has caused mortality rates for trauma patients to decline more than 40 percent in the region.

Moreover, the system automatically triggers an alarm when hospitals become overloaded. That allows investigators to immediately investigate whether a contagion, natural or man-made, has occurred and, if so, quickly pinpoint the source and range of the outbreak.

"I'd give the new system an A-plus," says Acker, who has directed the regional emergency system since 1990. "It's pretty foolproof. Anyone in a hospital who can point and click can use it."

Area hospitals paid the $80,000 tab for the system.

"It works to their advantage," Acker says. "Hospitals want to report that information because when they're full, they don't want more patients."

Given the system's early promise, Phillips has formed a company, LifeTrac Technologies LLC, to market the system nationwide.