Mtnmedic
iPF Novice
Is there anything like this? I'm the Fire Chief of a small all-volunteer fire department in frontier north-central Oregon. I'm also a career Paramedic. I've been developing our fire department from scratch since late 2011 entirely from donations of used equipment as our operating budget is less than $3000 per year (for fuel, utilities, insurance and modest repairs). I have been able to get some good used iPads (1, 2, 4 and two first-gen Minis) donated to us for use in a variety of situations. The larger iPads are being used as vehicle-mounted information resource and mapping units. The two minis with some medical patient resources and information-taking apps are placed with medial jump kits in each of our two primary emergency medical response vehicles.
What we're trying to do is get away from sheets and slips of paper, pens, etc. which at times can be misplaced or hard to find during a call. On medical runs, we usually have one person assigned to gathering information and entering it while the others attend to patient care, rescue, etc. We are almost an hour away from the nearest ambulance or mutual aid so we spend a lot of time at the scene with a patient and constantly getting vital signs, etc.
The idea is to be able to print out a sheet or slip of patient information for the arriving ambulance or helicopter team and have a copy for ourselves as part of our reporting requirements. There is no set standard for this as it's new territory when it comes to electronic information management. We're primarily a rescue team that will slowly integrate into more formal electronic reporting guidelines later on.
One solution has been to get a mobile/portable printer which prints on 8.5" x 11" paper amd has a small footprint that would be placed in our each of our two emergency medical response vehicles and just print from the iPad from wherever in range of the printer. That would be the simplest solution.
Another solution, which I thought would be interesting, is to obtain a couple of SMALL printers, thermal paper printers like those used to print receipts on the go which I could stick in the medical kit bag along with the iPad so that printing right there at the scene could be done. We have two iPad Minis, one for each primary medical vehicle (the ambulance/rescue and the backup/2nd out rescue). This could be an elegant solution that accommodates both vehicles/teams with the added bonus of portability between ANY of our vehicles (we have five vehicles, each of which is capable of providing emergency medical services in some fashion).
The only requirements are that they are capable of AirPrint for easy compatibility with iPads, easy to set up/use and SMALL. Color is NOT needed- black only is okay.
Does anyone have any suggestions?? Does anyone have a good used smaller AirPrint-capable printer they might be willing to donate to our department to help us solve this issue in exchange for a letter of donation to a non-profit volunteer outfit for tax credit?
What we're trying to do is get away from sheets and slips of paper, pens, etc. which at times can be misplaced or hard to find during a call. On medical runs, we usually have one person assigned to gathering information and entering it while the others attend to patient care, rescue, etc. We are almost an hour away from the nearest ambulance or mutual aid so we spend a lot of time at the scene with a patient and constantly getting vital signs, etc.
The idea is to be able to print out a sheet or slip of patient information for the arriving ambulance or helicopter team and have a copy for ourselves as part of our reporting requirements. There is no set standard for this as it's new territory when it comes to electronic information management. We're primarily a rescue team that will slowly integrate into more formal electronic reporting guidelines later on.
One solution has been to get a mobile/portable printer which prints on 8.5" x 11" paper amd has a small footprint that would be placed in our each of our two emergency medical response vehicles and just print from the iPad from wherever in range of the printer. That would be the simplest solution.
Another solution, which I thought would be interesting, is to obtain a couple of SMALL printers, thermal paper printers like those used to print receipts on the go which I could stick in the medical kit bag along with the iPad so that printing right there at the scene could be done. We have two iPad Minis, one for each primary medical vehicle (the ambulance/rescue and the backup/2nd out rescue). This could be an elegant solution that accommodates both vehicles/teams with the added bonus of portability between ANY of our vehicles (we have five vehicles, each of which is capable of providing emergency medical services in some fashion).
The only requirements are that they are capable of AirPrint for easy compatibility with iPads, easy to set up/use and SMALL. Color is NOT needed- black only is okay.
Does anyone have any suggestions?? Does anyone have a good used smaller AirPrint-capable printer they might be willing to donate to our department to help us solve this issue in exchange for a letter of donation to a non-profit volunteer outfit for tax credit?