Burn Patient Transfer System (BPTS)
Following a military or civilian mass casualty or disaster event, military treatment facilities would experience a significant increase in burn patient volume. Burn injuries are rarely isolated events; typically there is some type of associated trauma along with a burn injury, thus inclusion of trauma bed resources is desirable. There is only one military Burn Unit, the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio, TX. While able to expand capacity in the event of a mass casualty event and depending on the geographic area(s) involved in an event, bed capacity could easily be overwhelmed. The ability to maximize efficiency and effectiveness of triage and subsequent care would be critical to the management of an overwhelming surge in burn patient volume and intensity. This effort aims to conduct research and development of a burn/trauma patient transfer system that would provide a platform for reporting immediate and surge burn/trauma bed availability across the U.S. and among NATO partners, and electronically match patient and bed location and match patient acuity with open beds at clinical burn facilities nearby.
The research project award recipient was selected from the Offerors who responded to MTEC’s Request for Project Proposals (19-01-BPTS).
Burn Patient Transfer System (BPTS)
Project Team: Chenega Healthcare Services, LLC
Award Amount: $5.33M
Project Duration: 61 months
Project Objective: The goal of this project is to research, develop, and test a web-based, and mobile app-accessible, open architecture cloud-based system to track capacity and improve the logistics of burn patient/trauma patient triage and transfer in and between military and civilian treatment facilities in the event of a war, disaster, nuclear or other mass casualty with large numbers of burn patients.
The effort will streamline the transfer and management process using a mobile app and a web-based, secure, redundant/resilient server architecture to input and track burn bed status/ availability for Burn Centers to provide full situational awareness for capacity/capability optimization. The system would enable a medical regulating officer to serve as the central military transportation clearing authority, as well as other stakeholders, such as the participating Burn Centers/ Department of Homeland Security/National Disaster Medical System, local/state/national Emergency Medical Services coordinating system(s) and NATO Partner Nations to see this data and current status in real-time. They could also securely integrate/push data with other existing peer data servers. In addition, visualization and collaboration tools would allow individuals across all echelons of care to work together independent of geographic location to achieve an optimal response to such a disaster. The development of the prototype will include a highly scalable, industry/open standards-based infrastructure, and new technology applications that provide highly reliable, high-integrity, resilient capabilities on a nationwide basis.
