A Dallas tech company founded by a longtime paramedic is helping patients—particularly the uninsured—avoid costly ambulance trips and emergency room visits, ultimately saving patients, cities, and hospitals millions of dollars. 

Graphium Health, a Plano-based provider of mobile-based software that better manages anesthesia practices, has launched FieldMed, a dedicated community health software platform. Intended to better serve patients in community health programs, FieldMed is what Graphium Health is calling the “first of its kind to offer paramedics readily accessible, accurate and HIPAA-compliant data-capture capabilities.”

FieldMed leverages intelligent software to provide paramedics with patient data and trends, such as vitals, labs, food and shelter needs, and environmental risks, according to a release. With these reporting capabilities, FieldMed aims to treat patients better, while helping paramedics, city fire/EMS departments, and hospitals reduce lost hours and resources.

It’s all about delivering hyperfocused care: Graphium Health says FieldMed is the first patient-first platform that’s specifically designed for community healthcare.

The new company uses technology to reapproach the rapidly rising nationwide trend of community-based healthcare. These types of programs—intended to bridge the gap between 911 emergency response and home healthcare—use certified paramedics to help give non-emergent response resources and treatments to patients.

The essence of community health could be something as simple as signing the patient up for a Meals on Wheels program or getting them the right walker or wheelchair for their needs. Communities that adopt community health paramedicine programs often notice a 70 percent reduction in emergency room visits, which keeps patients with non-emergent problems from tying up ambulances and emergency rooms.

Launching FieldMed

If anyone’s familiar with this type of healthcare, it’s Daniel Frey.

Frey spent 14 years as a paramedic for the McKinney Fire Department. Before that, he spent 11 years with the city of Paris. Too many times he realized he and his team would get called for service to the same house for different reasons each time. 

Some people had an adverse reaction to new medication, while others might have tripped on an area rug. Paramedics often didn’t have a choice but to transport them via ambulance to an emergency room, where all they’d get is 15 minutes with a doctor. 

So Frey helped start a community health paramedicine program to help patients with a non-emergency problem or in-need of home healthcare. Programs like this have taken off in 500 cities nationwide because they save money and improve patient outcomes. Frey says in many ways, these individuals are taking the place of the doctors who used to do house calls.  

The problem was, there was no unified program to manage patient data for these community health paramedics visiting the patients. 

Frey aims to solve that problem with the launch of FieldMed.

“Having served as a community health paramedic, I’ve seen the need for this software first-hand, as it allows paramedics to track data points that previously didn’t exist in other EMR systems,” he says. 

With FieldMed, paramedics can enter a house, enroll patients in the program, and instantly know their medical history, background, and what medications they are on. 

“Our software helps the paramedics who are visiting these people in the house and keeping up with their medical needs,” Frey, co-founder and vice president of business development at FieldMed, says. “Instead of an automatic trip to the hospital, paramedics can now better track the root of 911 calls, particularly for non-emergent needs.” 

Along with Frey, FieldMed was created by by the founders of Graphium Health and Community Paramedics, which helps pioneer community health programs throughout the U.S. On Tuesday, the team officially launched FieldMed at the EMS World Expo in New Orleans to showcase it in front of representatives from 50 countries around the world.

“Through our work with Graphium, we saw an immediate need in the healthcare industry for a software platform to streamline community health patient care,” says Daniel Dura, co-founder and CEO of FieldMed and Graphium Health. “FieldMed is transforming community healthcare by creating technology that allows providers to capture rich data which, in turn, helps them prioritize patient care.”

Alex Edwards contributed to this report.

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