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1969 may have seen the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but the birth of electronic medical records was still a long way off.
At the fabled Woodstock festival that drew a half-million music lovers that August, paramedics documented on paper, as best they could, emergency care they administered to sick and injured revelers during those 3 chaotic days of peace, love, rain, mud and rock 'n roll.
 Today, emergency medical personnel are trained to document carefully and extensively all the care they deliver at huge public events. Just ask Michael Wargo, BSN, MBA, PHRN, CMTE, CHS, the man who oversees emergency care for throngs of racing fans at Pocono Raceway.
"We provide medical services for their NASCAR race twice a year, which brings in about 300,000 spectators," said Wargo, who directs the Office of Emergency Management & Network Emergency Preparedness for the Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN), of Allentown, PA. "It requires a staff of about 70, including physicians, nurses, paramedics and others."
Capturing patient data accurately is crucial for medical, demographic, even legal reasons. "Documentation is needed for litigation concerns that invariably come up at an event of this size," Wargo noted. "Someone says, 'I've fallen and injured myself on-site.' We have to confirm that. Or a family might say, 'A member of the family was at the event but didn't come home the next day. Can you tell us what happened?'"
Deploying LVHN's electronic medical records system to the sprawling racetrack in Long Pond, PA, posed challenges, however.
Infrastructure Challenge
 Pocono Raceway has three medical stations: an infield trauma care site for drivers, crew members and spectators; a second infield first aid center for non-urgent care, and a mobile field hospital for grandstand care (shown in the photo at right are Lehigh Valley Health Network's Stephanie Klegarth, RN, and Brent Schoenfeldt, DO).
Deploying LVHN's electronic medical records system - The T-SystemEV - would have required bringing laptops on site and enveloping the entire venue in a wireless infrastructure.
Wargo resisted that idea. "It would have taken all day to set up and taken too much time away from treating patients," he explained. "We wanted that medical record to go with us but having to set up infrastructure was more of a hassle than it was worth."
Eventually, Wargo and his ER team hit on a better plan: they would return to pen and paper - with a high-tech twist.
They utilized T-System's emergency department solution DigitalShare, which leverages T-System's paper T-Sheets with Shareable Ink, an enterprise cloud computing company that transforms paper documentation to structured data.
"It is a rapidly deployable, paper version of the T-System EMR using intelligent pen technology," Wargo explained. "The actual paper used is pixilated front and back with a unique digital footprint recognized by the pen. The digital pen is intelligent enough to know who wrote on which paper chart. You sign in and sign off using an official signature, so there is accountability."
LVHN clinicians download data from each pen into docking stations on their work computers, which instantly translate their handwritten documentation into a PDF format. As an added safety feature, they can log on and double-check their input to make sure the pen captured their handwriting correctly and verify that their charts are complete.
Forbes' Recognition
In December, business media giant Forbes placed Shareable Ink on its 2011 list of America's Most Promising Companies.
"Shareable Ink converts natural human input - such as handwriting and gestures - to structured data, useable by electronic health records and other systems," Shareable Ink president and CEO Stephen Hau told the press. "Currently, we process a page of medical documentation every 30 seconds of the day."
Wargo is sold on the technology. "No matter the event, this is now our charting mechanism," he told Executive Insight. "It captures demographics, insurance information and other data and feeds it in real-time to our command center. For example, if we have 'x' number of patients being treated at an event and we see immediately that many of them are having stomach illness, we then have early situational awareness of potential food poisoning. Or we can pull up what medications we used and how many bandages we used at Pocono Raceway so next year we can stock up on those items."
Using its T-System/Shareable Ink solution, LVHN has also accelerated the process of submitting claims forms to the federal government for reimbursement for disaster relief efforts, Wargo said. And the system has streamlined LVHN's mass immunization program, during which as many as 14,000 people receive flu shots in one weekend.
"It used to literally take months for a team to scan 14,000 individual consent forms," Wargo said. "Now we digitize the consent forms. We can transfer all the consent forms from all those patients to EMR forms automatically, saving us months of manpower."
Michael Gibbons is an editor at ADVANCE Newsmagazines, the parent company of Executive Insight.
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