Researches from the Case Western Reserve University’s (CWRU) nursing school are aiming to establish a connection between hospital patient records and medical flight crews.

They are aiming to do this based on research that when local hospitals transfer patients to higher-level care facilities, there is a 30% higher death rate than if they had stayed put. Case Western researchers believe the answer lies “somewhere in the medical records.”

At the moment, flight medical crews do not have access to electronic health records from various hospitals because of lack of interoperability.

A CWRU instructor, Andrew Reimer, says he and his group is working on technology that takes information from patient charts to present a more comprehensive picture of a patient’s medical situation. They plan on using information gathered from hospital charts, flight crew and the new facility.

“Families also need the information to determine what’s best for their loved ones–move the patient or stay,” he said in the announcement.

It is quite cumbersome to extract medical information such as patient demographics, medical and surgical histories, procedures, laboratory, pharmacy, vital signs, billing data and patient outcomes. This is why, the CWRU researchers have created a digital template that contains a table with 42 pieces of information to be filled out, in order to make data reporting more consistent.

“Searching a patient’s chart for appropriate health information at a single hospital can take days. But the new interface technologies allow information to be mined from 42 different data points in minutes,” Reimer said.

Initial tests conducted at the Cleveland Clinical Hospital System have yielded “some success”, by connecting the flight and hospital information for patients transported to the facility’s 1,300-bed main campus in Cleveland, 10 community hospitals and 14 family health and ambulatory surgery centers.

According to a new analysis of HIT-related safety events by the Patient Safety Organization – ECRI Institute, data transfer between health IT systems is often inadequate from a patient-safety point of view. The report highlighted issues such as inadequate data transfer, poorly functioning systems, poor system configurations and inaccurate data entry in patient records.