State Initiative Overview

• What is Pulsara?

  Pulsara is a HIPAA-compliant app that unites the entire care team — including EMS, hospital staff, and emergency responders — on a single communication platform. Pulsara gives teams a fast way to create a dedicated channel for each patient, allowing them to enter critical patient information and share it with the right team members at the right time.

  

  With Pulsara, teams can be built on the fly according to each patient's needs. Pulsara alerts the appropriate team members and adds them to the patient's channel, giving ALL team members one way to communicate about their patients. Pulsara can replace pagers, radio reports, faxes, and the many phone calls it takes to coordinate care.
  
  Pulsara's network connects any and all members of the care team, regardless of location or organization. Anyone can use Pulsara to communicate and coordinate logistics around all patients, every day, for every method of arrival. From routine transports to time-sensitive emergencies to major incidents, Pulsara works for every patient you encounter. 

• Why Pulsara?

  The State of Florida has chosen Pulsara to: 

  • Reduce hurdles across the state for care coordination during time-sensitive emergencies, pandemic response, mass casualty incidents, mass gatherings, special events, and natural disasters.

  • Empower EMS services by enabling treatment-in-place and transport to alternative destinations (i.e., behavioral health, urgent care, substance abuse).

  • Reduce costs locally, regionally, and statewide during disasters or surge events by coordinating multi-agency response using the same system communities use every day.

  • Reduce healthcare facility costs during surge, capacity, or resource capability deficits by efficient load balancing and transferring patients across regions and around the state.

  • Provide the ability to establish a statewide transfer center for rural, underserved regions to assist with bed placement when traditional referral partners are unavailable.

  • Reduce pressure on local and regional healthcare resources.

• Around the US

  Pulsara instantly connects every member of the team across a wide variety of emergency scenarios, making it a choice solution for communication between organizations across entire states. 

  In Texas, Pulsara enables critical communications across local and state resources for prehospital communication, downstream hospital team communication, system load balancing, incident management, and patient tracking and logistics.
  
  In Arkansas, organizations across the state adopted Pulsara to improve communication for STEMI and stroke patients as part of a statewide initiative to improve treatment times for time-sensitive emergencies. The Arkansas Department of Health recently approved a grant for hospitals statewide to use Pulsara.
  
  Connected teams are the future of emergency response. Florida is among the states leading the charge.

  Click Here for Case Studies & Published Research / Literature

• Click here to view Implementation Steps 2-7

  Step 2: Schedule Implementation Consultation

  After your request to join the network is processed, a Pulsara representative will email you with details on how to register for a discovery call via Zoom with a member of our Customer Success team. 

  During this call, we will review your organization's details and application configuration requirements, discuss the implementation process, and address any additional questions you may have.

  Step 3: Create User Accounts

  Following the discovery call, email invitations will be sent to the individuals designated as the initial Pulsara administrators for your organization. These individuals will then be able to create their user accounts and initiate user invitations for users.

  Consideration: If your organization employs Federated Authentication for user account management, contact the Pulsara Technical Services team at help@pulsara.com for further assistance. User invitations should not be sent prior to the Technical Services consultation.

  Step 4: Configure Devices

  The next step in the implementation process is to configure devices in preparation for training and testing. Pulsara is available as a mobile application in the iOS and Android stores and is also accessible via the web browser. Please review Pulsara's Device Recommendations and compatible mobile and web browsers prior to configuring devices. If you have any questions regarding configuration, please reach out to Pulsara Technical Support.

  Consideration: If your organization uses a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution to manage company-owned devices, please review the MDM Considerations Knowledge Base Article and contact the Pulsara Technical Services team at help@pulsara.com for further assistance.

  Step 5: Training

  Pulsara empowers organizations with a dynamic 'Train the Trainer' model. Our goal is to ensure that your team is equipped to successfully complete your initial implementation and seamlessly onboard and integrate new users onto our platform over time. Details of the training plan for your organization will be discussed with the Pulsara Customer Success team.

  Step 6: Testing

  To gain familiarity with Pulsara and to establish a basic understanding of how the platform will be operationalized within existing workflows, patient channels can be created for testing. Fire/EMS organizations can create their own test patient channels and should refer to the testing Knowledge Base Article (KBA) in the resources section for guidance. Healthcare Facilities - to see test patients as they will appear from Fire/EMS, please contact us to coordinate testing. 

  Step 7: Prepare to Go Live

  Completing the steps outlined above will ensure that your organization is ready to go live with Pulsara. The Pulsara Customer Success (CS) team will work with you to establish a "Go-Live" date and time. 

  NOTE: A healthcare facility becomes visible to EMS as of their "Go-Live" date/time.

• What devices does Pulsara recommend?

  Pulsara has wide device compatibility to make sure you have many choices from the latest mobile technology to many older generation phones and tablets! To find out which devices and browsers are compatible with the Pulsara communications platform, please check out this article:

  • https://knowledge.pulsara.com/technical/setup/which-web-browsers-and-mobile-devices-can-we-use

  Smartphones, iPads or Web Browser

  Pulsara is compatible with most Android or iOS Smartphones

  • Whether Hospital owned or personal devices, smartphones provide the greatest degree of functionality and flexibility for those whose roles keep them on the move throughout their shift.

  iPads

  • A tablet stationed in a central location provides the convenience of a larger screen for easy entry of information, best for departments who are less mobile throughout the day and will be reliably at the desk where Pulsara is located.

  Accessing Pulsara from a web browser is a great solution for team members who may sit at a desk. 

  HIPAA Security

  Whether hospital-owned or a personal device, Pulsara is 100% HIPAA compliant, 100% of the time. You and your team can rest easy knowing the information shared on the platform is secure and patient health information is never stored on the device. If the device is lost or stolen, no one will have access to patient data, including attached photos.

  Data Consumption

  The Pulsara communications platform consumes no personal data when connected to WiFi and MINIMAL data when on a cellular network, such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile, among others.

• Why are my receiving facilities not in the Transport Destinations list?

  Facilities will display in the transport destination list when they are live and ready to receive patients. If a facility you transport to is not in the list, please share this resource page with them and encourage them to join the network at no charge. If you need assistance with Network Outreach, fill out this form. 

• Can Pulsara integrate with my ePCR?

  The short answer is yes! Any ePCR vendor can consume our public API at no charge. Click here for a list of vendors who currently have an active integration. If your ePCR solution is not on the list, let your ePCR rep know that you would like them to collaborate with us.