Emergency Preparedness for Children with Special Health Care Needs Using Minnesota Emergency Medical Services for Children Information System (MEMSCIS)

Emergency and Disaster Preparedness for Children with Special Health Care Needs (CSHCN) requires availability of detailed, child-specific information in an organized plan.

Children with Special Health Care Need and their families often face unique medical emergencies, which can exceed the expertise of their parents, primary care (PCP) or emergency care providers.

Minnesota's EMSC Targeted Issue Grant, "Emergency Preparedness for Infants with Significant Heart Disease" has demonstrated that modern information management technology can be used to make ACEP/AAP Emergency Information Forms (EIF) available via the Internet in a secure, private fashion. 96 patients have been tracked for 1- 2 years.

Now in year 3, the study has enrolled 83 infants with cardiac disease in the HIPAA-compliant system known as Minnesota Emergency Medical Services for Children Information System (MEMSCIS) is tracking 66 control infants with cardiac disease. Each emergency visit by one of the patients is evaluated to assess the impact of MEMSCIS.

The Health Resources and Services Administration Maternal Child Health Bureau, has awarded the University of Minnesota Department of Pediatric an EMSC Targeted Issues grant. This grant will allow MEMSCIS the capability of expanding and providing families and children with special health care needs a tool to improve the transition to home.

The goal of the project is to improve emergency and disaster preparedness for children with special healthcare needs by:

• Partnering with families and other health care providers to enroll children into MEMSCIS
• Developing and disseminating an electronic hospital discharge tool that can be used to populate a brief hospital discharge summary and enroll children into MEMSCIS
• Enrolling children with special health care needs from a variety of venues, hospitals, primary care clinics, specialty clinics

The website and database provide several functions:

• Provides diagnosis and procedure lists, and pediatric formulary
• Utilizes the standard American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)/ American College of Emergency Physicians Emergency I nformation Form (EIF)

In addition, the electronic EIF is under development at the American Academy of Pediatrics as a data exchange standard.