Serving Communities HIO & Beyond Lucid Technologies Connect San Francisco Bay Area Fire and EMS Services to California’s Statewide Data Exchange Framework
Achievement on behalf of programs focused on underserved Medi-Cal and mental-behavioral health patients will help modernize Emergency Medical Services delivery in the core of California’s technology ecosystem by connecting with hospital partners.
CONTACT:
Dan Chavez Jonathon S. Feit, MBA, MA
Executive Director Co-Founder & Chief Executive
SCHIO Beyond Lucid Technologies, Inc.
(831) 610-3700 (650) 648-3727
dchavez@schio.org Jonathon.Feit@beyondlucid.com
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San Francisco & Alameda, Calif. (March 17, 2025): Serving Communities Health Information Organization (SCHIO), a health information exchange focused on connecting patients and care providers across several Bay Area counties, and Beyond Lucid Technologies (BLT), an innovations firm that connects Mobile Medical professionals with their ecosystems of care, today announced that they have connected King-American Ambulance, a 9-1-1 service based in San Francisco, and the City of Alameda Fire Department, to the California Data Exchange Framework. The electronic patient care record (ePCR) systems used to achieve this line were Zoll emsCharts on behalf of King-American Ambulance, and ESO on behalf of the City of Alameda Fire Dept. This connection achieves Milestone 2 of the California Data Exchange Framework (DXF). To date, every Mobile Medical service that has successful connected to the California DXF has done so by partnering with BLT.
SCHIO provides health information exchange services to the City and County of San Francisco with a specific focus on sharing critical health data, over time, on behalf of patients that are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the State of California’s Medicaid program. These patients are frequently low-income, high risk from a health perspective, have complex medical needs, and/or are children. The health and safety risks posed by these and related social factors (which include challenges accessing and affording care) help to explain why socioeconomically disadvantaged patients disproportionately rely on the 9-1-1 system, including emergency medical services, provided by both fire and ambulance agencies, to address both chronic issues and acute injuries and diseases.
In San Francisco, King-American Ambulance—the longest-operating private ambulance company in the U.S.— provides 9-1-1 services to parts of the community that have faced a range of widely documented challenges, including substance use disorders. Sharing such data across the care continuum provides an opportunity to more efficiently deploy various resources, activate emergency departments, and disrupt the cycle of addiction.
In the City of Alameda, the Alameda Fire Department (AFD) provides all-hazards and emergency medical services. It is a pillar of the Alameda CARE Team (Community Assessment Response & Engagement) alongside the Alameda Police Dept. and Alameda Fire Services, offering around-the-clock alternative response, that is, an option other than transport to the emergency department to nonviolent individuals facing a mental health crisis. Linking both emergency and non-emergency clinical data via SCHIO—sourced from two data systems interoperating (namely, ESO Solutions and BLT’s own MEDIVIEW patient care record software, respectively)— will help put patient engagements into content, so AFD can better share its insights with care delivery partners.
According to Dan Chavez, Executive Director of SCHIO: “This is a very exciting next iteration in the health information sharing and interoperability in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Peninsula has not traditionally participated in data exchange, and I am confident that this will make a demonstrable difference in equity focused, improved health outcomes.”
"I do medical-legal reviews and almost half of the cases are somehow related to communication between EMS and the emergency department. Maybe half is a little overstating but certainly plenty of them. Areas like POLST and advance directives, where we are really struggling to get accurate information, and the mechanism of injury, social determinants of health,” said Dr. Chris Colwell, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center “It would have an impact on a number of levels: When we see a patient in the emergency department, there are a lot of pieces of critical information but no more so than we are getting ready to do a disposition and if I’m sending patients home, I need to know what situation I’m sending them to. And I can say that in a large percentage of my patients—I don’t know the exact percentage because it changes somewhat by day—but…we see a lot of elderly patients in the emergency department. They may have fallen. If I’m sending them back to a good-structured, well-supported environment, that’s a totally different world than if I’m sending them back to one where they’re going to be by themselves, and the same environment they just fell in, and are very likely to fall again. And this is a significant impact on their lives, and that’s a significant percentage of the patients we’re seeing in the emergency department.
In an interview, Dr. Colwell continued: “It’s not just the elderly. For patients in the emergency department that are in extremis, the information on POLST, advance directives, wills and those types of things are critical to decisions that we’re making. In many situations, there has been good work on it—but when that’s not communicated to us, all that good work that has been done is for naught, because without knowing it we have to go on the assumption that nothing exists. There are additional resources—we’ve got a social medicine team that can apply some resources we never had available before, based on information that paramedics have but we don’t necessarily. Social medicine is one of the resources that we can potentially apply. Knowing what situation the patient is going back to—particularly, a lot of urban emergency departments are facing this [even] intermittently too: you see your patient one weekend and then see them two weeks later and the situation has changed. They may be able to communicate some of that but either due to medical conditions or because it’s a confusing system and it’s not always easy, we can’t always get accurate information from patients. This is where this information system is critical. I can access inpatient records and that is certainly helpful [but out-of-hospital data obtained from Fire & EMS] is the big missing piece that we need in the emergency department.”
Jonathon Feit, Co-Founder & CEO of Beyond Lucid Technologies, said: “Echoing Dr. Colwell’s sentiment, partnering with Fire & EMS agencies in San Francisco and the City of Alameda to share data with the California Data Exchange Framework via SCHIO highlights our embrace of the Bay Area as a global hub of technology, business, and tourism. Some emergency healthcare patients live here. Others are visiting. Patients seeking emergency care come across all walks of life. Perhaps more than anywhere in the world, it’s appropriate for our home region to demonstrate the power of interoperability to delivering informed, connected care.”
About SCHIO
Established in 1996, the Serving Communities Health Information Organization (SCHIO) is one of the oldest and most advanced multi-stakeholder health information exchanges in the country. SCHIO connects more than 200 organizations including primary care and specialist physician groups, hospitals, federally qualified health centers, county clinics, providers of mental health and substance use disorder services, EMS, community service providers, national and local reference labs, imaging centers and ancillary providers. Through comprehensive information curation and sharing, SCHIO advances the wellbeing for everyone in the communities it serves. Learn more at www.schio.org.
About BEYOND LUCID TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
Beyond Lucid Technologies develops software to inform Mobile Medical Professionals about patients’ needs even before they arrive on-scene, then empower them to share insights across the care continuum in real-time. Our Communication Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) software is patented, and packed with innovations that make Fire, EMS, Non-Emergency/Inter-Facility Medical Transport, Critical Care (Ground & Air), and Community Paramedicine / Mobile Integrated Health (CP/MIH) safer, more efficient and more cost-effective. Critical focal areas include post-crash care, intervening in the cycle of substance use disorders, and ensuring that patients’ end-of-life wishes and special health needs are accessible to Responders while they are at the patient’s side. We have been called “Silicon Valley’s Emergency Medical Technology Experts,” and serve Mobile Medical agencies across the U.S., including Puerto Rico & Guam. Our “prehospital pipes” connect more Mobile Medical services to hospitals and public health information exchanges than any other company. Winner of the 2019 Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership Award for EMS Communications Platform, and awards from the Journal of EMS and the EMS World. Join BLT in realizing a vision of Mobile Medical interoperability at BeyondLucid.com.
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