- What is the Washington Emergency Medical Services Information System (WEMSIS)?
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The Washington EMS Information System, WEMSIS, is the state's prehospital data repository for electronic patient care records.
- Why use WEMSIS?
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Electronic prehospital data collection assists service, county, region and state efforts to monitor, evaluate and assess field experiences, patient care and the EMS system as a whole.
- What does it cost me to participate in WEMSIS?
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Access and submission to WEMSIS is free. In many cases, those services already using a vendor to collect electronic data can laterally submit their data to WEMSIS.
- How do I participate in WEMSIS?
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WEMSIS is a Web-based program. We provide many services access to a EMS/fire service account to begin collecting data electronically. Other services using their own NEMSIS Gold-compliant vendor laterally submit data to WEMSIS. Follow the three steps outlined below.
- Can WEMSIS report both EMS and fire data?
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Yes. Services around the state are using WEMSIS for both prehospital and National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) data collection. Agencies may contact the Washington Fire Chiefs directly for assistance.
- How do county medical program directors or destination hospitals access data in WEMSIS?
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We developed additional access levels to accommodate and enhance such data exchange. A service may create access accounts for their medical program director (MPD) or a destination hospital at any time. Many services are currently benefiting from such partnerships in data exchange.
- Which software vendors have an interface with WEMSIS?
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As WEMSIS is based upon NEMSIS V2, vendors should possess NEMSIS Gold compliance. Follow this list for a list of NEMSIS Gold-compliant vendors. Some vendors may have NEMSIS Gold compliance; however, a NEMSIS/WEMSIS module has additional costs over the basic vendor software. Be sure to check with potential vendors for any additional costs that may be charged for a NEMSIS/WEMSIS module.
- I currently use another vendor to collect data and I'm having issues exporting data to WEMSIS?
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Many compatibility issues have been due to data validity. In data entry, the use of special characters (&, , ", and ') cause issues with data validity when exporting your data in XML format. Gold-compliance requires XML format functionality. As such, the only fix for such data issues is to either avoid special characters or use the following equivalents from the ampersand (&) to include the semicolon (;).
& = &
> = >
" = "
' = '
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