Veona Ambulance & EMS

What this is

Veona Ambulance & EMS is the pre-hospital service line — the work that happens before the patient reaches the hospital door. EMS (Emergency Medical Services) covers the whole chain: a fleet of ambulances and their crews, the emergency-call intake desk, dispatch (sending a vehicle and crew to a call), the field run sheet (the paramedic’s record of what was done on the way in), and the handoff when the ambulance arrives at the receiving Emergency Department. The work it captures feeds the rest of Veona automatically — a completed run raises charges in Veona Bill, field consumables draw down stock, the arrival opens an ED visit, and the whole service line reports into Veona Pulse.

Key terms used on this page:

• Paramedic — the field clinician who works the call: records the patient’s condition and treatment on the run sheet and eSigns it.
• EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) and Driver — the rest of the crew rostered onto a vehicle, alongside the paramedic.
• Dispatcher — runs the control desk: maintains the fleet and crew rosters and assigns a vehicle and crew to a call. The dispatcher does not write the clinical run sheet.
• Emergency call — a request for an ambulance, logged at the desk with the caller, location, chief complaint and a priority (P1 most urgent → P4 routine transport).
• Dispatch — the act of assigning an ambulance and crew to a call. It opens a run and starts the response-time clock.
• Run / run sheet — also called a patient-care report: the record of one ambulance response, carrying the response-time chain (dispatched → en-route → on-scene → transporting → at-destination), the field assessment, a vitals series, interventions, the transport, and any consumables used.
• Handoff — the arrival summary handed to the receiving team when the ambulance reaches its destination. For a known patient brought to the ED, the handoff opens a receiving ED visit.

Who uses it

Roles below are the canonical ambulance roles. The boundary between them is deliberate — the dispatcher coordinates, the paramedic treats.

• Dispatcher — runs the control desk. Maintains the fleet register and crew rosters, intakes emergency calls, and dispatches an ambulance and crew to a call. The dispatcher does not author or sign the clinical run sheet.
• Paramedic — works the call in the field. Authors the run sheet (assessment, vitals, interventions, transport, consumables), records the handoff, and eSigns the sheet. The paramedic does not manage the fleet, the crew roster, or dispatch — those are the dispatcher’s control-desk actions.
• Receiving clinician / nurse — the ED team reads the dispatch and run board read-only, so they can see an inbound ambulance and the pre-hospital summary at handoff. They do not run the service.

An Administrator can do everything in the module.

Editions

Veona Ambulance & EMS is a paid clinical add-on — it is not a base/always-on module, and it is not auto-entailed by any other module. It is included in the Hospital, Network and Veona Enterprise editions; facilities on other editions can buy it à-la-carte. If a facility’s edition does not include the module, it simply does not appear and its screens are unavailable.

Note

Ambulance depends on Chart being entitled — the same dependency declared for the other Wave 1 clinical add-ons. In practice the receiving end of an ambulance run is the ED module, which is where a known patient’s arrival lands.

Screens

The Veona Ambulance work surface (menu entry Ambulance & EMS) has four tabs. Per-run detail is reached by clicking a row on Run Sheets, never as a standalone menu entry.

• Dispatch (the landing tab) — the dispatcher’s live board: the operational readouts (fleet available, open calls, active runs, median response time), the Open Calls list with a Dispatch action, and the Active Runs currently on the road. Log Emergency Call raises a new call here.
• Fleet & Crew — the fleet register (each ambulance’s call-sign, plate, type and base, and its live status) and the crew rosters (paramedic / EMT / driver shifts assigned to vehicles).
• Run Sheets — the paramedic’s field record and run history. Clicking a run opens the detail panel: the response-time chain, the assessment, the consumable register, Sign Sheet, and Record Handoff.
• Handoffs — the arrival-summary log: every handoff, the receiving unit, the linked ED Visit number (when one was opened), who received the patient, and whether a pre-alert was phoned ahead.

How a run flows

1. The dispatcher logs an emergency call on Dispatch — caller, location, chief complaint, priority, and optionally a known patient.
2. The dispatcher dispatches an in-service ambulance (and optionally a lead attending) to the call. This opens a run, stamps the dispatch time, and flips both the call and the vehicle to Dispatched.
3. The paramedic advances the run along the response-time chain on Run Sheets — En-Route → On-Scene → Transporting → At-Destination — each stamping its timestamp exactly once (a re-advance to the same stage is rejected, so the intervals stay truthful). The vehicle’s board status mirrors the run.
4. The paramedic authors the sheet (assessment, destination, distance, consumables) and eSigns it with the universal 6-digit PIN. A signed sheet is immutable.
5. The paramedic records the handoff at the receiving unit. This closes the run (HandedOff), frees the vehicle, closes the call, captures the charges, and — for a known patient brought to the ED — opens the receiving ED visit.

Manage the fleet and crew

Fleet & Crew is the dispatcher’s register — the ambulances and the shifts rostered onto them.

• Fleet — every ambulance with its call-sign, plate, type (BLS, ALS, MICU, PTS), base, current crew, and live status. Select Add Ambulance to register a vehicle (a call-sign is required). Change a vehicle’s status from the status control on its row.
• Active Crew — who is on shift, their role, and the vehicle they are on. Select Roster Crew to assign a staff member (paramedic, EMT, or driver) to a vehicle for a shift window; select Stand Down to end a crew member’s shift.

The handoffs log

Handoffs is the arrival-summary log — every handoff recorded at a receiving unit. Each row shows the handoff and its run, the receiving unit, the linked ED visit number (when the arrival opened one), who received the patient, whether a pre-alert was phoned ahead, the arrival time, and the summary.

Note

The ED Visit column shows a value only for a known patient handed to the in-house ED. An unidentified casualty, or a handoff named to an external facility, opens no in-house ED visit and shows a dash.

How it integrates

Arrival → ED visit (the pre-hospital → ED chain). When a handoff is recorded for a run that carries a known patient and the receiving unit is the in-house ED (the default — see the caveat below), Veona opens the receiving ED visit through its single canonical path, so it is created exactly once and can never double-fire. The visit is opened with arrival = Ambulance, its acuity derived from the dispatch priority (P1 → ESI 1 Resus, P2 → ESI 2, P3 → ESI 3, P4 → ESI 4), the pre-hospital summary attached as the encounter reason and visit complaint, and a top-acuity arrival landing in Resus. No formal triage row is written — the ED re-triages on arrival; this is the arriving acuity, not the final one. The new visit number is stamped back onto the handoff (visible on the Handoffs tab), and the same path captures the ED attendance facility fee exactly as a walk-in triage does. Because each run can have only one handoff, the ED visit is created exactly once and can never double-fire. See Hand Off the Patient and Open an ED Visit and the receiving-side view in Triage an Emergency Patient to the Board.

Caution

The arrival hook fires only for a known patient handed to the in-house ED. An unidentified casualty (no patient linked to the call) opens no ED visit — the handoff is recorded as a summary only. A handoff named to an external facility (the receiving-unit text contains phrases like “transfer to”, “referred to”, “general hospital”, “teaching hospital” or “federal medical”) is treated as an inter-facility transfer and also opens no in-house ED visit. In both cases the ED Visit column on Handoffs shows a dash.

Billing & GL out. On handoff, the run raises charges through the same central billing path every clinical module uses:

• A per-run fee — AMBULANCE-RUN.
• A per-kilometre AMBULANCE-MILEAGE charge, derived from the transport distance recorded on the sheet (the run sheet captures distance in metres; the charge quantises to whole kilometres, so a sub-kilometre transport raises no mileage line).
• Each priced field consumable is captured as its own revenue line.

All are priced from the tenant tariff, idempotent on their source reference, and best-effort (a billing hiccup never unwinds the recorded clinical work). Once assembled into an issued invoice, Veona Bill posts the accrual to the General Ledger (Dr Accounts Receivable / Cr Revenue) — see One Set of Books.

Caution

Only a run with a known patient bills. An unidentified-casualty run has no patient to bill — its charges are not captured (there is no later “bill once the patient is identified” sweep wired today).

Consumables → COGS (stock). When a field consumable (O2, an airway or trauma kit, dressings) is picked from a stock item, recording it draws the item down from the one inventory ledger (FEFO across the item’s available lots) and posts cost-of-goods, in the same transaction as the run-auto-reorder pass. A free-text consumable that is not linked to a stock item is logged but does not draw stock. COGS is attributed to the Ambulance/Emergency cost-centre.

Pulse out. Ambulance ships real metric sources computed from the live tables: runs (with a fleet-utilisation breakdown by vehicle call-sign), response time (the P90 of the dispatched → on-scene interval), dispatch-to-handoff TAT, and ambulance revenue (read from the captured run + mileage charges). These surface automatically in the Pulse catalogue, dashboards and report builder.

Audit & eSign. Every state change — call intake, dispatch, each stage advance, sheet save, sign, handoff and consumable — is written to the tamper-evident audit channel (PHI-flagged where a patient is linked). The run-sheet attestation uses the universal eSign PIN through the central signing service, the same one used across Veona.

Ambulance settings

The module’s Settings surface holds the response-time and dispatch policy — the response-time target and whether a lead attending is required on dispatch. Each change saves as you make it.