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California Partners with Biospatial

October 14, 2019

(Falls Church, Va.) – The California Emergency Medical Services Authority (EMSA) went live in the fall of 2019 as the 21st state to use the Biospatial platform. EMSA now will be able to use existing EMS data to deliver more timely actionable information analyses, at no cost to the state.

Biospatial uses emergency medical services and health-related data sources to provide timely, national-scale syndromic detection, monitor real-time trends, and alert to syndromic anomalies critical to the nation’s health and safety. EMSA will submit National EMS Information System (NEMSIS) data elements to the Biospatial platform to assist in national preparedness and enhance California’s ability to visualize their data with other data layers of relevance.

“Integrating Biospatial’s data analytics into the California EMS information system will allow us to identify near-real-time and retrospective trends that will reduce morbidity and mortality in our emergency and public health care systems,” stated EMSA Director Dave Duncan, MD. “We at EMSA are very excited to evaluate and share these results as they become available.”

California has a population of 39,497,000 people living in its 163,696 square miles that include everything from sprawling urban areas to rural desert landscapes. California has approximately 5.4 million EMS system activations per year.

Biospatial develops partnerships with state and local data owners to bring health-related data into the Biospatial platform; in turn, Biospatial provides data owners access to data visualization tools, syndromic surveillance and alerting, summary dashboards, and clinical and operational reporting at no cost. Users at local, state, regional, and national levels use the Biospatial platform tools to support near real-time bio-surveillance, preparedness and response, syndromic and opioid surveillance, and automotive/traffic safety missions.

Biospatial is working closely with the National Association of State EMS Officials (NASEMSO) to connect with other state EMS offices. NASEMSO has partnered with Biospatial because of the value the analytics can provide to the NEMSIS data that state EMS offices collect. Biospatial has created a pathway to contribute to state-specific surveillance and offer real-time value to state epidemiologists and state health officers.

State EMS offices that are interested in participating with Biospatial should contact Dave Zaiman at dave.zaiman@biospatial.io or 612-961-5396.