Vehicle Crash Video Helps ER Doctors

Physicians will use traffic surveillance cameras to view vehicle crashes and rescue operations on New York highways to better help victims.

The real-time view of crash scenes through a camera lens may provide emergency-room physicians with information that may help them provide better care to crash victims, according to Dr. John McCabe, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse.

For the study, considered a first of its kind, the researchers will have access to nearly 20 closed-circuit video cameras installed in and around Syracuse.

The information we get from the scene is what we relay on to mobilize staff and equipment in the emergency room before the patient arrives, and often this information can be ambiguous, said McCabe.

Recently, it was reported that 23 people had been injured on a highway near Syracuse, but the ER physicians saw from the video cameras that many of the people were ambulatory and would not need to be admitted to the hospital, so trauma patients in the hospital did not have to be moved and extra ER personnel did not have to be called in from home.