Why a Smartwatch Is the Perfect Tool for EMS

It’s 0300 hours. As you give your third round of fentanyl and hang a second ketamine infusion on the way to the hospital, you realize you have no idea what time you gave your first doses.

Your partner yells from the front that he wrote it down, and it’s on a piece of paper crammed somewhere in the monitor.

After searching for a couple of minutes, you find a remnant of paper that says something along the lines of:

“anyl 5275”

Well. That’s not going to help much.

And this is just a pain management call.

If only you hadn’t lost your pen, and your partner hadn’t shredded the paper.

Now imagine the headache when your paper, pen, or internal-memory notes go missing on a more complicated call—a bradycardic, hypotensive, hyperkalemic patient, or a dynamic cardiac arrest.

If you’ve been doing this job for more than a few minutes, you probably don’t need to imagine it.

It’s all too common.

EMS Doesn’t Always Have a Dedicated Scribe

It must be nice working in a hospital with a dedicated scribe sitting at a computer, recording everything as it happens.

But that’s just not the reality EMS faces.

There’s always the monitor timestamps, but they’re limited in what can be entered, and you need someone within reach to quickly timestamp events. It would be nice to just do it yourself without having to bust out a clipboard, or put your gloved hand in your pocket to get your phone and start writing notes.

Gross. Please don’t.

There has to be a better way.

How Many of You Already Wear a Watch?

How many of those are smartwatches?

It might be time to start using them to their full potential.

Smartwatches are more than clocks and timers. They combine the convenience of having a timepiece and timer right on your wrist with many of the capabilities we normally associate with a phone.

And that makes them surprisingly well suited for EMS.

Your Watch Is Already There

You don’t have to reach into a pocket. You don’t have to find a pen. You don’t have to find a piece of paper. You don’t have to ask your partner to keep track of the time for you.

You can simply record the event as it happens, without having to stop what you’re doing, and find a writing implement.

No more asking Captain Bill for his ratty, wet sheet of paper with barely legible, misspelled words to decipher.

No more yelling at Jim to time your epi administrations and mark them on the monitor.

No more trying to combine monitor times with written times from Frank’s watch that seems to be five minutes slow.

Your watch can do it for you.

One Place. One Timeline.

That’s the real advantage.

Instead of having some events recorded on the monitor, some written on a piece of paper, some associated with medication packaging, and others floating around in someone’s memory, your important events can be captured in one place.

And because they’re recorded as they happen, you aren’t relying entirely on your memory to reconstruct the call later.

That’s Where CodeMark Comes In

CodeMark puts your event timeline right on your wrist, with quick access to medications, interventions, rhythms, and other important events—all recorded with an automatic timestamp.

No clipboard.

No pen.

No scraps of paper.

No yelling across the truck for someone to get the time.

Just tap, record, and keep doing your job.

Your entire event timeline is there when you need to review it.

What a difference.

When I started using it, paperwork went from being my most hated aspect of the job to my most hated aspect of the job—but without the anger.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.

But it certainly made the timeline part a whole lot easier.

And that’s the point.

One Less Thing to Worry About

CodeMark isn’t trying to replace your monitor, your EPCR, or your clinical judgment.

It’s simply giving you one less thing to worry about when the call gets busy.