Should have studied more than STEM!

Powerline networking (http://www.newegg.com/Powerline-Networking/SubCategory/ID-294) is another solution. I hang a Roku off of a powerline network node and it consistently streams HD well.

A lot of military reports and first responder reports are still written in all caps.

Very valid points. Only advantage may be traversing otherwise crowded places or delivering to otherwise inaccessible locations (streets blocked by rubble, locked doors, other emergency-level conditions).

"Critical medical supplies" comes to mind.

Otherwise known as a Yahoo board meeting

Sadly, the telecom lobbyists have gotten to some places first and have nixed municipal fiber through legislation. In North Carolina, for example.

And a followup to the doctor thing - transports can be made to facilities without doctors. Usually this is a nursing home or the like. EMS can still administer some medications and do some procedures (depending on Medical Control rules) en route to those facilities.

Sure, MD advisor if needed, usually by phone or the like, but they do not sign off on all patient care reports - at least not in the majority of states in the U.S. Patient care reporting for EMS usually ends at the end of transport, mainly because they charge for "loaded mileage." The ER will have their record and the EMS agency its record.

The only one I can come up with prima facie is that the health of one may affect the health of many. Tracking the vectors of diseases and shaping responses to them seems to be an appropriate function of a state-level health organization. For that reason at least part of your health data is not your own in the sense that you have full control of its dissemination. The benefits of knowing that piece seem to outweigh individual control of that data. There is always the possibility of a quarantine situation in which individual rights may be further constrained so there is certainly room for more oversight as to the specific implementation of this with that state-level organization.

I suppose there could be some use for de-identified weapons in research. Not sure what that would be though.

They collect the data as well and share it (de-identified) for research in addition to their role as a format arbiter. It is technically a medical record collected and stored outside a doctor-patient relationship - just making sure that folks realized that fact.

Medical devices are often used en-route in an EMS vehicle so no doctor may be involved there. Check out NEMSIS (www.nemsis.org). They collect a lot of EMS data nationally.

There is a large research market for de-identified data, regardless of its source. I suspect that is what is being sold. Even that is fairly well-regulated out of fear of HIPAA if nothing else.

Through initiatives like NEMSIS (www.nemsis.org) and marrying that data with ER/hospital data, the loop closes for providers in the continuum of care. The data can drive performance improvement for each step in that continuum of care as hospitals have never been so informed about what happened on an EMS call and vice versa. This directly improves patient care on an individual level and on progressively higher levels. Several states are doing this with data with the leader being North Carolina.