Sunday 5 August 2012

Computers in Ambulances

By Allyson Westcot


In the medical care field, portables on ambulances need to be in a position to handle jarring, shocks, drops, varying weather conditions and more. Recently, a central Missouri ambulance district decided to go from paper to the Panasonic Tough Book 18 to streamline operations and help ensure more accurate recordkeeping. They recently underwent an upgrade to the Toughbook 19. After this switch, one of their ambulances had technical issues on to the way to the site of an auto crash. A fire broke out underneath the ambulance. The fire swiftly spread to both the passenger compartment and the engine.

One of the team members had been utilizing the notebook shortly before that, and had some unfinished work left on it. After the fire was put out by local firefighters, that team member retrieved the laptop. He thought it had been a one hundred percent loss. It was soaked, and the case was cracked and warped in places thanks to the extraordinary heat of the fire. But he turned it on and found it in working order.

That sort of reliabilityĆ¢€"in circumstances beyond what any person would expect an any PC to handleĆ¢€"is the type of reliability healthcare workers have to have. Catastrophe response teams and other emergency employees have to be able to depend on their equipment.

A short while years before the switch, the team had already learned the value of durable PCs. A team member left the laptop on the bumper of an ambulance after cleaning the inside of the vehicle. The laptop PC stayed in place during about an hour of driving in a thunderstorm. Soaked and dirty from the drive, the computer still worked as well as it had before the trip.

When info should be conveyed now, with no errors or hang-ups due to a malfunctioning computer, durable PCs are essential equipment to have available.




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