Arkansas DOH Announces Pulsara Now Available Statewide

On September 27th, 2023, the Arkansas Department of Health announced in a press release that the Pulsara platform will be available to all ambulance services, acute care, sub-acute care, long-term acute care, nursing homes, behavioral health hospitals, and other affiliated healthcare facilities in Arkansas through funding by the Arkansas Department of Health, starting October 1st. 

"Arkansas is the first state in the country to make the full functionality of this platform available to all EMS agencies, hospitals, affiliated healthcare facilities, public health, public safety, and emergency management," said Bala Simon, MD, DrPH, Deputy Chief Medical Officer at the Arkansas Department of Health. “This will help our healthcare providers improve communication to improve patient care and outcomes.”

Pulsara is a communications and logistics platform designed to streamline communication across the healthcare continuum. Pulsara fosters better communication between every member of a patient’s care team, making it easier for EMS to communicate patient information to the hospital. "[EMS] can enter the patient information into the Pulsara app and communicate with one touch of a button to multiple healthcare teams," said Dr. Simon.

By ensuring that EMS has a secure way to transmit critical information to the hospital instantly, Pulsara helps clinicians ensure that patients receive care as quickly as possible. The Arkansas Department of Health stated: "The sooner patients are treated for time-sensitive conditions such as stroke and heart attack, the better the outcomes will be. This is critical to decreasing mortality and morbidity and for improving the lives of Arkansans and their families." 

This video is from a news story that was published on katv.com. Check out the original story here. 

In an interview with KATV.com, Mack Hutchison, clinical operations manager at Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services (MEMS) in Little Rock, AR, explained that Pulsara frees EMS up to focus more attention on the patient. "With Pulsara, we don’t have to do a radio report," said Hutchison. "We can send all of the information directly from the scene, and that information can then be forwarded to the appropriate services needed at the hospital.”

Instead of using multiple different communication methods to get information to the hospital, EMS can simply enter the patient's information into Pulsara. Pulsara will send a notification to the right team members, letting them know to prepare for the patient.

“Arkansas is the first state to provide this infrastructure for all hospitals, all EMS, even sub-acute care like nursing homes, physician offices, they have access to the platform if helpful,” said Dr. James Woodson, Founder and CEO of Pulsara. “We were able to reduce their treatment times by 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes. For things like heart attack, you look at the one-year mortality, it increases by 3% for every minute of delay. That makes it a big deal to the citizens of Arkansas.”

In 5 months, Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock, Arkansas reduced their average door-to-puncture time for stroke patients by 58%. Download the case study to learn how they did it.