IVENA / Special COVID-19 situation

The networking of rescue services (control centers) and hospitals in the regular rescue service has long been an issue at the respective levels of responsibility of the federal states and municipalities.
In some federal states and regions, solutions have already been successfully established in recent years.

There are already state-wide systems (e.g. Hesse), with cross-state cooperation (e.g. Lower Saxony/Bremen), or solutions for metropolitan areas (e.g. Munich), which assign emergency patients to Clinical Departments in real time via the rescue control centers.
The software solution IVENA (Interdisciplinary Proof of Care) is used in these areas. This software is hosted in German security data centers in compliance with contractual and data protection regulations.

Using this web-based network, specialist clinical capacities (incl. intensive care units / ventilation / cardiac catheterization / stroke unit etc.) are displayed in real time.
Patients are assigned transparently and the Clinical Departments are also informed of their arrival via the web. This network system is already the control instrument for the specialist and resource-oriented allocation of all emergency patients in the connected control center areas and rescue services.

The state-wide network also enables large-scale utilization of resources in special situations (mass incidents of patients), cross-state cooperation (Lower Saxony / Bremen) and specialized assignments in individual cases. In addition, there are transparent networks for important time-sensitive "tracer diagnoses" (e.g. heart attack, stroke) and thus timely and specialist referrals are already possible today.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a country-specific additional tool for the "special COVID-19 situation" was developed and programmed at short notice. The IVENA state group COVID-19 Lower Saxony / Bremen was founded for this purpose.

IVENA State Working Group COVID-19 Lower Saxony / Bremen is composed of:

Prof. Dr. med. A. Flemming (Hanover)
G. Wiegand (Frankfurt, MAINIS company)
Prof. Dr. med. A. Callies (Bremen)
J. Gellern (Oldenburg)
Dr. med. W. Hagemann (Emsland, Grafschaft Bentheim)
Dr. med. R. Siepe (Osnabrück)

Start of data collection in the hospitals of COVID resources in Lower Saxony: 15.3.2020