Global Medical Response’s (GMR’s) healthcare technology company, Access2Care, has used APIs to connect its medical transport ordering application with Epic, one of the world’s leading providers of health information technology. This time-saving application is already in use by many of GMR’s customers in its ground ambulance division, American Medical Response (AMR).


With online ordering just a click away within the leading electronic health record (EHR) application, using SMART on FHIR secure data transmissions, hospitals will see transport-ordering times reduced to less than 45 seconds, saving time while increasing efficiency and throughput. Ordering from this single integrated platform allows requests for all levels of medical transportation services, including air ambulances, ground ambulances, wheelchair van services and ride share services such as Lyft.

“We are focused on innovation that improves the patient experience while optimizing the efficiency of healthcare systems, freeing nurses and doctors to do what they do best–provide care,” said Sven Johnson, GMR senior vice president of innovation. “Through the Epic EHR and App Orchard, we are now part of one of the largest health information technology marketplaces in the world and can bring our transport solution to more hospitals faster and with greater ease than ever before.”

For application users — such as emergency department nurses, case managers and transfer center employees — the new app will revolutionize the transport-ordering experience. In addition to time savings, these healthcare professionals will benefit from the app functionality: automatically and securely importing patient information, determining the appropriate level of transport, providing paperless physician certification statement for medical necessity documentation and providing real-time ETAs.

For hospital administrators, the integrated app will streamline transfers, freeing up beds and filling empty ones and increasing hospital patient flow. Through the app reporting function, they will also have greater visibility into the patients’ medical transportation journey. Johnson explained that a hospital or health system doesn’t need to be an AMR ground ambulance customer to use the technology because it can link to other transportation providers.


Additionally, hospital IT departments can rest easy knowing a standard app interface is available between the Access2Care app and this EHR application. The standardized app integration drastically cuts the time to go live with medical transport ordering. What used to be a large-scale custom API implementation, taking months and requiring a formal IT project can now be managed quickly and easily with an IT ticket.

The Access2Care online ordering solution eliminates phone calls, enhances ease of use, improves patient flow, provides real-time transport status visibility to clinicians while suggesting the most appropriate level of service and managing pre-auth and brokered transportation requirements.

“We are looking forward to partnering with clinicians, administrators and hospital IT staff to demonstrate just how big of a game changer our online ordering solution will be for them,” said Johnson.