Designing, development and validation of an app to reduce the response time of the emergency medical services

Júlia Loverde Gabella; Iago Amado Peres Gualda; Isadora Laguila Altoé; Matheus Henrique Arruda Beltrame; Pedro Henrique Aguillar da Silva; Dalton Breno Costa; Fernando César Grossi Paggi; Sérgio Sanches Fabres Filho; Miyoko Massago; Luiz Gustavo de Paulo; Marcos Rogério Bitencourt; Anjni Patel Joiner; João Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci; Luciano de Andrade

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0299828

Designing, development and validation of an app to reduce the response time of the emergency medical services

PLoS One. 2024 Mar 25;19(3):e0299828. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299828. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Júlia Loverde Gabella¹, Iago Amado Peres Gualda¹, Isadora Laguila Altoé¹, Matheus Henrique Arruda Beltrame¹, Pedro Henrique Aguillar da Silva¹, Dalton Breno Costa², Fernando César Grossi Paggi³, Sérgio Sanches Fabres Filho³, Miyoko Massago⁴, Luiz Gustavo de Paulo⁵, Marcos Rogério Bitencourt⁴, Anjni Patel Joiner^{6

7}, João Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci^{2

6

7}, Luciano de Andrade^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Medicine, State University of Maringá, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.
² Center for Global Emergency Medicine Innovation and Implementation, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.
³ Department of Engineering, Unicesumar, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.
⁴ Postgraduate Program in Health Sciences, State University of Maringá, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.
⁵ Postgraduate Program in Management, Technology and Innovation in Urgency and Emergency, Department of Medicine, State University of Maringá, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.
⁶ Department of Emergency Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.
⁷ Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.

Abstract

Introduction: Delays in prehospital care attributable to the call-taking process can often be traced back to miscommunication, including uncertainty around the call location. Geolocation applications have the potential to streamline the call-taking process by accurately identifying the caller's location.

Objective: To develop and validate an application to geolocate emergency calls and compare the response time of calls made via the application with those of conventional calls made to the Brazilian Medical Emergency System (Serviço de Atendimento Médico de Urgência-SAMU).

Methods: This study was conducted in two stages. First, a geolocating application for SAMU emergency calls (CHAMU192) was developed using a mixed methods approach based on design thinking and subsequently validated using the System Usability Scale (SUS). In the second stage, sending time of the geolocation information of the app was compared with the time taken to process information through conventional calls. For this, a hypothetical case control study was conducted with SAMU in the Maringá, Paraná, Brazil. A control group of 350 audio recordings of emergency calls from 2019 was compared to a set of test calls made through the CHAMU192 app. The CHAMU192 group consisted of 201 test calls in Maringá. In test calls, the location was obtained by GPS and sent to the SAMU communication system. Comparative analysis between groups was performed using the Mann-Whitney test.

Results: CHAMU192 had a SUS score of 90, corresponding to a "best imaginable" usability rating. The control group had a median response time of 35.67 seconds (26.00-48.12). The response time of the CHAMU192 group was 0.20 (0.15-0.24).

Conclusion: The use of the CHAMU192 app by emergency medical services could significantly reduce response time. The results demonstrate the potential of app improving the quality and patient outcomes related to the prehospital emergency care services.

Copyright: © 2024 Gabella et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

MeSH terms

Case-Control Studies
Communication
Emergency Medical Services*
Humans
Mobile Applications*
Reaction Time

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–CAPES: finance code 001); the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico–CNPq: research productivity grant – processes 310067/2020-0; and the Araucaria Foundation for Scientific and Technological Development of Paraná State (Fundação Araucária de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico do Estado do Paraná (FA)). This work received the following funding: L.A. was funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq productivity scholarship). M.M. was funded by Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination (CAPES doctorate scholarship). J.L.G. was funded by Araucaria Foundation Paraná state (scholarship for scientific initiation). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Other authors received no specific funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript