Available Georgia Information

The email below was distributed November 6th by the GA Dept of EMS and Trauma.

Good afternoon,

We now have 1.1 million PCRs in GEMSIS! I have sent out reminders to those of you having difficulty keeping your PCR submission to GEMSIS up to date. Give me a call if you are still having problems – I can help.

A few of you are still using the old GAPCR2000 Data Exchange or Firehouse Software data port for your GEMSIS imports. Both of these ports will be closed January 1, 2013 so you must move to either direct entry of your PCRs on GEMSIS or an XML version of your third party software and use the NHTSA/NISE 2.2.1 Data Exchange. Call me if you have any questions or need any help.

How does this affect FIREHOUSE Software?

The second paragraph, only applies to any customer still using the old FH EMS export that is not the NEMSIS patient export. If you are using the NEMSIS EMS code set with the XML export you are good to go forward as you are today. If you are using the old patient data export that is not an XML file, you will need to start using the NEMSIS patient export on Jan 1 for state reporting.

If you are not using the NEMSIS patient and demographic export, and need some help getting it going, please call our technical support team for assistance.

Attached are our current validation rules without the reminders. These are the only rules that will have points taken off. Please review them and also distribute them to your staff so that they too know what GEMSIS needs. I hope we have all validations in for now but next year as we work on information quality we will add more. Also we have NEMSIS 3 coming up and that will require changes.

Remember GEMSIS only accepts calls that originate in Georgia. Calls with the incident occurring out of state should be reported in that states PCR system. Double check a few of your PCRs on GEMSIS to be sure that incident state is Georgia and the incident county is going in correctly.

Upgrade your third party software to the latest version. Many vendors have been working very hard to fix errors so take advantage of this and upgrade. In talking with many of you it was found that after your server crashed or you upgraded your software sometimes even logging onto GEMSIS became a problem. Codes of all kinds may have disappeared or become convoluted. So be aware that any major change or disruption can cause far reaching issues.

More and more of you are checking the PCR information on GEMSIS and all this hard work shows in the improved information we are seeing in GEMSIS. Thank you!

Thank you, Angie

Angie Rios
GEMSIS Project
Office of EMS and Trauma
Division of Health Protection
Georgia Department of Public Health
2600 Skyland Dr. Lower Level
Atlanta, Ga. 30319