Newcastle-based software company Surge have recently launched a dedicated new brand Surge MedTech, as they continue to grow in the digital healthcare space.

In 2019, Surge partnered with the Great North Air Ambulance who were looking for a way to move away from paper records and keep a digital log of all the work they do including individual patient interactions. This led to the creation of ARCEMS, a system that enables paramedics to capture patient details wherever they are working via a dedicated mobile app.

Capturing this information lets air ambulance services maintain a full audit log of their activities and then use this information to identify areas of improvement meaning patient care is continuously reviewed and enhanced.

Following successful roll-outs at the Great North Air Ambulance, Lincs & Notts Air Ambulance and Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance, the ARCEMS software then evolved to help out in the world of critical care patient transfers and the new ARCCTS software was born.

In 2020, Retrieve South West, headed up by Scott Grier, who is also National Critical Care Transfer Lead at NHS England, began using ARCCTS. The software proved essential during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where at its busiest there were 2,300 intensive-care patients moved between UK hospitals from September 2020 to March 2021, which represented a year-on-year increase of 191.5%¹. Speaking about the relationship with Surge Scott said, “At times of significant pressure on our service during the recent pandemic wave, their support was an important part of our service’s ability to deliver critical care transfer to patients in the South West and beyond.”

Following the continued growth and evolution of their software Surge have recently launched a brand new sub-brand Surge MedTech. Speaking about the move, Chief Commercial Officer Bruce Watson said, “Following some of the great traction we’ve had over the past few years we feel the time is right to have a dedicated brand in the MedTech space in order to raise further awareness of our software. It’s an exciting time as we’ve just launched our new website and have already begun work on the next evolution of our software. The team is incredibly proud of the software, as they can see it is helping make a huge difference to how patients are cared for every day.”

The team based on Mosley Street in Newcastle have found that giving customers rapid access to their data has been a massive time saver. Historically many services using paper patient records had to spend long periods of time gathering the information needed for clinical governance reporting. As Tim West, HEMS Paramedic at Great North Air Ambulance Service, said, “One of the other best things is the ability to be able to audit really quickly as the data is there on tap, so as a clinician it helps save us a lot of time. ARCEMS has made quality assurance a less arduous task and has helped with compliance.”

The Great North Air Ambulance Service are going even further with their data analysis and are using the data from ARCEMS to power a range of Microsoft Power BI dashboards which examine everything from how long it takes the crew to get airborne through to the impact that specific medical interventions have.

Surge MedTech is part of Surge Technologies Ltd. The team also develops a range of mobile applications and other digital products for customers in retail, industrial processing, oil & gas and banking sectors.