Connecting Fire and EMS Data

CAD, RMS, NERIS, ePCR, NEMSIS, GIS, staffing, hospital, fleet and other systems each contain part of the operational picture. Learn why connecting them is valuable and why integration is often harder than it sounds.

Full guide planned · 15 min read

The short version

A fire or EMS incident rarely exists in only one system. Dispatch knows when the call was received. CAD knows what units responded. GIS knows where it happened. RMS and NERIS record what occurred. The ePCR and NEMSIS record the patient-care encounter. Staffing systems know who was working. Hospitals may know the eventual clinical outcome. Each tells part of the story, and the value is in the connections: knowing an ambulance arrived in eight minutes is useful, but connecting CAD, ePCR and outcome data may eventually help answer whether response, treatment, transport and clinical outcome are related. Eventually, and carefully — things that move together are not necessarily causing one another.

Start here

If you read one thing on this subject, read this.

Go deeper

Official resourceNERIS — Fire Safety Research Institute

Data Exchange Compatibility

How NERIS is designed to take data from local CAD and RMS systems.

Why it matters

What to hold your records vendor against when they describe their NERIS integration.

Official resourceNEMSIS

Interoperability

How EMS data is meant to move between field, state, national and hospital systems.

Why it matters

Names the gap crews feel directly: care data rarely reaches the hospital record, and outcomes rarely come back.

Official resourceEMS.gov

Using EMS Data

How standardised EMS information supports operations, provider safety, patient care, public health and research.

Why it matters

The argument for why connecting the data is worth the effort at all.

Questions to ask your vendor

  1. What system is the source of truth for this field?
  2. Does the same incident have a common identifier across systems?
  3. Can systems exchange data automatically?
  4. Is the integration one-way or two-way?
  5. How often is the data refreshed?
  6. Are definitions consistent between systems?
  7. Who owns the data?
  8. Can the department export it?
  9. Can we connect it without purchasing another proprietary interface?
  10. Are there privacy or cybersecurity limitations?
  11. How do we handle patient information?

This is a reading list, not a guide

Everything above was published by someone else, and is here because it is the clearest treatment of the subject we could find and verify. The Hub’s own guide to this topic is still being written. If you know a better source than the ones listed, that is worth telling us before it is.

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