This guide will take you through a complete journey to every part of your AngelTrack server, and configure it along the way.
To get your new AngelTrack installation up and running, connect to it using the URL, username, and password you received via email. You will be the server's administrator, able to see and modify absolutely everything.
After signing the Terms of Service document, you will be shown the Quick Start page, used to quickly configure the basics of your operation: zones, stations, vehicles, employees, affiliates, and contracted facilities...
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Did you finish the deployment punch-list?
The Deployment Punch-List gives the steps to take your organization mobile and paperless. Have you looked through it yet?
If not, review it now. There are many things to consider before jumping in to the software.
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Set the next dispatch ID
AngelTrack numbers its runs sequentially, starting at 1. If you are transitioning from another CAD system and wish to continue your current sequence of run IDs, AngelTrack's run IDs can pick up where the old system left off. Contact the folks at AngelTrack Technical Support using the link provided, and they will be happy to adjust your starting run ID.
Caveat!
These run IDs must increase over time, as new records are added to the system; their issued ID numbers cannot ever decrease. Therefore, if you set a starting run ID of (say) 100000, and then some dispatch records are created as 100000, 100001, 100002, and so forth, you cannot thereafter switch back to smaller ID numbers like 1000, 1001, 1002, and so forth.
This is relevant for EMS operations who want their run IDs to reflect the current year. For example, in the year 2018 you may want all of your run IDs to begin with "18", as in 1800001, 1800002, 1800003, and so on. That is perfectly acceptable, and you will have no problems. You can even change ID numbers monthly, for example in March 2018 you could have run IDs 180300000, 180300001, 180300002, etc. However, what you cannot do is put the month number in front of the year number, like 031800001, 031800002, 031800003.
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Configure company demographic information
AngelTrack is required to upload your company's "demographic" (aka "DEM") information to your state trauma registry. Per the NEMSIS rules, this "demographic" upload will automatically occur whenever your demographic information changes, and also at least once a year. Learn more...…
Demographic information includes your lists of vehicles, crew members, stations, frequently-visited facilities, authorized procedures, medical devices, authorized medications, key personnel, and disaster capabilities. AngelTrack will automatically assemble all of this information from the relevant records in AngelTrack, provided you follow this quick-start guide and configure everything as indicated.
You will be configuring most of the aforementioned lists of information during the other steps in this quick-start list. For the sake of this step, visit the Business Information item under Settings, and fill out the following sections:
- Completely fill out the "Identification" tab. Most of it should've already been done for you when your AngelTrack server was activated, but please double-check the data.
- Completely fill out the "Medical Contacts" tab.
- From the "Counties Served" tab, tick all counties where you operate. AngelTrack will auto-tick any counties where you have a station, but you must tick any additional counties that you serve.
- You do not need to fill out the "ZIP Codes Served" tab, because AngelTrack will automatically tick the ZIP codes according to your dispatch records.
- Completely fill out the "Capabilities" tab.
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Define zones (if needed)
Zones are used to divide up your service areas into manageable sections. Use them to:
- Divide up a city among several dispatcher desks, or
- Unite several operational divisions in different cities.
In a zoned system, dispatchers and supervisors can manage just their assigned zone, or they can look at the big picture. A zone could be an area of town, or a city, or a small division. QA, billing, invoicing, and most of HR remains centrally (i.e. globally) managed. Learn more...
If you have just one station, just one primary service area, or just one peak-hours dispatcher, then there is no need for zones. Your entire operation will run in the built-in "Global" zone.
The Zones List is accessible under Settings.
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Define stations
Your headquarters station is already defined, but you need to edit it and set the correct street address.
If you have additional stations, or regular posts, add them now.
AngelTrack will look up each station's street address, in order to show it as a pin on AngelTrack's maps, and to determine which zone it belongs to. If the street address is very unusual, causing the lookup to fail, you can manually provide the station's latitude and longitude.
The Stations List is accessible from the supervision sidebar, which is visible on the Supervision Home page and in related areas of the product.
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Define city certificates (if needed)
If you operate in cities that require your vehicles to be certified / licensed / inspected / stickered, AngelTrack will keep track of all of that for you. It will even show your dispatchers which vehicles have the necessary sticker to pick up any given patient.
You can add your city certificates right in the Quick Start page. To view and revise them later, visit the Certificate Types List, which is found under Settings.
Once all the necessary cities are listed, you can add certificates of the respective type to all relevant vehicles, taking care to specify the expiration date so that AngelTrack will remind you when it's time to renew. Learn more...
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Define vehicles
Define all of the vehicles in your fleet. Each vehicle has a Service Level that represents the highest level of care it is equipped to deliver. Its actual level of care may be lower, day by day, depending on who is on board... but AngelTrack will compute that for you automatically.
It is not necessary to enter your vehicles' odometer readings, because AngelTrack will collect those automatically as crews run calls.If using zones, then take care to assign each vehicle to its appropriate station: a vehicle receives its zone assignment via its station assignment.
If you have helicopters or airplanes, read the Air Medical Dispatching and Billing guide.
The Vehicles List is accessible from the supervision sidebar, which is visible on the Supervision Home page and in related areas of the product.
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Define employees and their roles
Define each employee that will be using AngelTrack. Set their initial password to something easy to remember (perhaps "changethispassword"); they can change it later once you invite them to begin using AngelTrack.
As you create each employee, you specify the roles they perform in your organization. Membership in roles grants them access to AngelTrack features necessary to perform that role. To see what each role is permitted to do, read the Roles and Permissions Guide. Do not grant an employee more access than they require to perform their job... and that includes yourself!
Each different role has its own tasks to learn:
- Crew Members
- Supervisors (Captains and Lieutenants)
- Dispatchers
- QA Reviewers
- Billers
- Human Resources
You can copy and paste the above links into emails to your department heads, asking them to look over the material.
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Define affiliates (if needed)
If you roll calls to and from other EMS companies, then define those EMS companies as affiliates in AngelTrack.
AngelTrack can handle different kinds of contractual and non-contractual relationships with affiliates, including:
- Progress reports from active crews for delegated calls, or not;
- In-house billing for delegated calls, or not; and
- Guaranteed payment for received calls, or not.
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Define contracted facilities
One of the ways that AngelTrack accellerates the call-taking and dispatch process is by keeping records of facilities and other destinations which your crews often visit. Each facility's record in AngelTrack contains all necessary address and contact information, so that it need never be entered again.
Enter this information now for each of your contracted facilities.
While doing so, you will tell AngelTrack about the contract you signed with the facility, including its pricing schedule. Once that information is on file, AngelTrack will automatically select the correct bill-to settings for every dispatch during call-taking. Your dispatches will then correctly move through postprocess all by themselves, without human intervention. So, it is very important to record all facility contracts before going live.
Dispatchers can create new facility records on-the-fly as needed... but pre-creating the records for your most important sites will help your dispatchers out while they are going through the process of learning a new dispatch system. Learn more...
AngelTrack can import your facility list from your old CAD software
If your old dispatch software can export its facility list, AngelTrack support personnel can groom and import the data into AngelTrack for you. That way, nobody has to retype all of your common pickup and destination locations.
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Create facility records for your common destinations
Over time, your dispatchers will create more and more facility records, covering every frequent destination -- be it hospitals or nursing homes or the residences of frequent fliers. For each of these, AngelTrack will accumulate mileage and travel time information, and you can specify contract pricing and run a ledger.
Your dispatchers are initially going to be climbing a learning curve, as they learn how to use AngelTrack. You can give them a head start by creating -- in advance -- facility records for your common destinations: nearby hospital ERs, and the dozen or so dialysis centers that are near your contracted facilities. By pre-creating these facility records, your call-takers and dispatchers can quickly select those destinations from a dropdown list while they are on the phone with a customer... and they will not need to ask the customer for street-address information. Learn more...
If you already have a list of common facilities, and you can export that list to .CSV (perhaps using Microsoft Excel), it can be imported right into AngelTrack by clicking the
button from the Facilities page. If your list is not in a format that AngelTrack understands, then ask AngelTrack support to import it for you.Your state health department may also have a list of all hospitals in your area. If you can obtain that list, send it to AngelTrack support for import, so that your dispatchers can enjoy a built-in list of all local hospitals.
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Create additional certificate types
AngelTrack comes pre-configured with the common certificate types (for crew, vehicles, and stations) required of all EMS companies. You can add your own custom certificate types, representing local regulations such as city inspections, toll tags, tax stickers, and so on. Whatever it is, if it has an expiration date, configure it as a certificate type in AngelTrack and then let AngelTrack remind you when it nears expiration.
Visit the Certificate Types List page (found under Settings) and input any custom certificate types you need to track. Each certificate type can apply to crew members, to vehicles, to stations, or to all three. Learn more... -
Review AngelTrack's preference settings
From the Settings page, visit the Preferences page to adjust AngelTrack's behavior to match company policy.
AngelTrack's default preference settings were carefully selected to be appropriate for almost any EMS operation, but you may have state and local regulations which require changes to the software's behavior. Learn more….
Among the preference settings are the timeclock rules, which must be adjusted to match your pay period length, start day, and start hour, plus your rules for on-call. Learn more...
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Specify the places where employees can clock-in and -out
AngelTrack's smart timeclock allows employees to clock-in and -out only when they are connected to a company-owned network -- which means: when the employee is physically present at a company facility. This is accomplished by providing AngelTrack with the IP addresses (or address ranges) of your company networks. When AngelTrack sees a request arriving from one of those networks, it allows the clock-in and -out.
From the Settings page, open the Timeclock Hosts page. AngelTrack comes pre-configured with two address ranges, representing all possible IP addresses... which means: there are no initial restrictions on the timeclock. Deactivate the pre-configured entries and then add your own entries, representing the IP addresses of your company networks. Learn more... -
Set retail prices
You must input your current retail pricing into AngelTrack's retail price schema, using the Pricing page under Billing Home. Note that only the ★ Principal Employee is permitted to modify the retail price schema.
The retail price schema is used when there is no facility contract, affiliate contract, or special patient rate in play. Learn more...
If you offer subscription services, i.e. flat-rate pricing on a monthly or annual basis, AngelTrack can do the billing for you. Learn more... -
Define tags (if needed)
Tags are used to categorize your dispatches. Your call-takers and dispatchers can select a tag for each dispatch, from a list of tags that you create.
Use tags to meet your bookkeeping requirements. For example, if you must keep track of which calls were delegated to you from a certain broker, create a tag that says "Call from the public" and another tag that says "Referred by broker", then train your dispatchers to select one each time the phone rings. Learn more...
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Define custom PCR fields (if needed)
If you want your crews to collect additional pieces of information that does not fit into any existing PCR field, you can add as many custom fields as you wish. Each custom field has configurable requirements for when crew members must collect it. Learn more….
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Review the medications list
When a crew member uses the PCR to record a medication administered to a patient, AngelTrack offers a list of possible medications. The built-in list contains all medications typically carried on an ambulance, but review the list to make sure that it matches your standard loadout. Add additional entries and/or deactivate built-in entries to suit your operation. Learn more...
The medications list is accessible from the Settings page.
Note that AngelTrack can automatically apply service charges for specific medications administered on-scene or during transport.
Automatic import of state-published medication list
If your state's Department of Health has published an approved medications list for EMS, and if they have placed it into the NEMSIS TAC repository as is customary for such lists, then AngelTrack can directly import it from there... and if so, then this has already been done for you when your AngelTrack server was first activated. Otherwise, you must groom the medication list yourself, to match your protocol.
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Review the procedures list
When a crew member uses the PCR to notate a procedure administered to a patient, AngelTrack offers a list of allowed procedures, along with patch level requirements. The built-in list contains every typical EMS procedure that your protocol might authorize. All you must do is:
- Tell the system which procedures you don't authorize, by clicking the "Active" button to deactivate them; and
- Of the allowed procedures, change the patch level requirement as necessary to match your protocol document.
The completed procedure list, including patch level requirements, is reportable to your state's trauma registry via a NEMSIS upload, which AngelTrack can automatically handle for you.
The procedure list is accessible from the Settings page.
Note that AngelTrack has a built-in protocol document which you can customize to match your own protocol; read the Medical Protocol guide to learn more.
Automatic import of state-published procedure list
If your state's Department of Health has published an approved procedures list for EMS, and if they have placed it into the NEMSIS TAC repository as is customary for such lists, then AngelTrack can directly import it from there... and if so, then this has already been done for you when your AngelTrack server was first activated. Otherwise, you must groom the procedure list yourself, to match your protocol.
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Input ECG monitors and activate integrations (if needed)
Input all of your ECG monitors into the Devices List (under Settings); read the Device and Equipment List Guide to learn more. If you own any monitors of the following types, then click to view the knowledgebase article for activating AngelTrack's integration with that vendor, allowing your crews to pull case data right into the PCR:
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Define lab tests (if needed)
If your vehicles carry mobile lab test equipment for use on-scene or while transporting, define those tests using the Lab Tests List page. Specify each individual test that your equipment can perform, and then define Batteries that represent batches of tests that are performed together. Learn more...
AngelTrack can automatically apply service charges for a-la-carte lab tests administered on-scene.
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Customize the built-in checklists or create new ones
AngelTrack has built-in morning checklists for BLS/ALS Ambulance and for Wheelchair Van. You can customize these any way you wish, or create new checklist items and build your own checklists. You also can rearrange the order of items in a checklist, or remove them altogether.
To roll your own, create your desired checklist items first, if they are not already defined; then create a new checklist and populate it with those items. You can also duplicate an existing checklist, if you wish to build a new checklist by using an existing checklist as a starting point. Learn more... -
Configure the Beacon app on your mobile devices (if desired)
AngelTrack automatically collects GPS positions from your crews' mobile devices whenever they are accessing the product. No modifications or special apps are required on the devices. Employees can even use their own personal devices, and should be encouraged to do so.
If you wish to receive 24/7 GPS positions from your mobile devices even when the devices are not in use, you can deploy the free AngelTrack Beacon app on them. Learn more….
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Consider allowing customers to book transport online
AngelTrack provides an online portal for your facilities and your affiliates to view their calls on your dispatch boards. If you wish, you can allow your facilities (and your frequent-flier patients) to use the portal to request future transports.
Visit the Preferences item under Settings to enable the self-serve booking feature.
When enabled, the portal offers your customers a simple and user-friendly self-booking interface. Their requests for transportation are then presented to your dispatchers for approval or denial. The customer is automatically kept informed via emails. Learn more….
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Send all crew members though the online training
The AngelTrack Training Portal is free to all, and provides online lessons and quizzes to quickly get your crew members up and running.
They can even print out certificates for their completed classes, in the event your state requires you to keep records that show all crew members were trained on the use of your ePCR software.
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Review internet access and notify employees
Publish AngelTrack's URL to employees and instruct them to begin using it.
Your AngelTrack server can generate a QR code for itself (visit the Settings page to get it), for you to print and hang on the walls at your stations. Employees can conveniently get the server's internet address by scanning the code with their mobile devices.Once logged in, the employees' first task is to change their password, input their mobile phone number and email address, and (for crew members) input their certificates.
It is very important that crew members (or their supervisors or HR) get their certificates registered in AngelTrack. This includes BLS/ALS patches, CPR cards, ACLS and PALS training, driver's licenses, wheelchair transport training signoffs, etc. AngelTrack uses the crew certificate records to automate decisions in dispatch and in QA; those decisions depend on the crews' patch level, and so will be incorrect if your crew members do not have their certificates registered.
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Obtain state trauma registry credentials and requirements
Under Settings there is an item named State Upload Status, where the trauma registry configuration is accessed.
AngelTrack Support will configure and test this for you. We just need you to contact your state trauma registry, and obtain for us the following pieces of information:
- Your company's upload username and password
- Your company's upload token if required
- Trauma registry's WSDL address, in http:// format
- Trauma registry's desired NEMSIS version (v3.3.4 / v3.4.0 / v3.5.0)
- Does the trauma registry wish to receive DEM uploads?
Relay that information to AngelTrack Support, and we will do the rest. Learn more…
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Configure EDI settings for electronic insurance claims
If AngelTrack will be filing your insurance claims, then you must configure your EDI settings. This is done from the Billing Configuration page under Settings.
Some of the sections were already filled-out during the earlier steps in this quick-start guide. For the sake of this step, fill out the following sections:
- Billing and rendering provider (green)
- Alternate provider IDs if required by your carriers
- Billing provider (orange) if you bill under a different name or NPI
- Override insurance pay-to (yellow) if necessary
- Clearinghouse (blue)
If you're not sure about these settings, just ask. Your AngelTrack integrator will configure them with you during your billing integration webexes.
In the "Clearinghouse" section, AngelTrack will display the name of the clearinghouse for which it is currently configured. To change this, you must import the payor ID list from the new clearinghouse. To do this, visit the Insurance Payor ID List under Billing Home, and click the
button. From the importer you can click "Show detailed instructions" to see exactly what file format is expected.Once you've got your EDI settings and your payor ID list squared away, configure AngelTrack's clearinghouse uploader/downloader, by visiting the Clearinghouse Uploader Configuration page under Settings. Learn more...
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Review these guides
Look over these guides and make a to-do list from what you learn:
- Guide to Securing a Mobile EMS Operation
- Disaster Preparedness Guide
- HIPAA Compliance Guide
- Narcotics Compliance Guide
- Customer Portal Guide
- Stripe Integration Guide to offer your customers an online self-pay portal
- Movi Integration Guide for providers who participate in the Movi transportation aggregator
- NSure Integration Guide for providers who use NSure / PayorLogic for insurance and demographic discovery
- Stryker HealthEMS Integration Guide for providers who operate in states that run Stryker HealthEMS
- ET3 Integration Guide for providers who participate in the CMS ET3 program
You can assign each guide to one of your supervisors, putting them in charge of implementing it.
Now go exploring!
That's it for the basics. With those basic elements configured, you can create shifts and dispatches, run some test calls, and watch completed calls move through postprocess. Keep in mind, AngelTrack will not consider your crew members qualified to run dispatches until they have input their certificates. Until they do so, if you wish to assign a dispatch to them, you must uncheck the box in order to force AngelTrack to assign to a crew that it believes is unqualified to run it.
To leave the Quick Start page, click any of the icons along the top row of the page. This guide explains what each top row icon does:
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Return to AngelTrack home page, which has links to all major areas of the product. Shortcut: ALT+H |
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Visit the Dispatch home page. If you click this icon while already at the Dispatch home page, it will take you to the dispatch board. Shortcut: ALT+A |
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Book a new dispatch. Shortcut: ALT+N |
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Book a new dispatch originating at your primary facility, also known as default facility A. |
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Book a new dispatch originating at your secondary facility, also known as default facility B. |
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Book a new dispatch originating at your tertiary facility, also known as default facility C. |
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Visit the Shifts page to begin, modify, and end shifts. The number in parentheses is the count of active shifts. Shortcut: ALT+V |
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Visit the Billing home page. Shortcut: ALT+B |
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Visit the Supervision home page. |
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Use the Incident system. The number in parentheses is the count of incidents assigned to you. Shortcut: ALT+I |
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Use the Incident system, and there is an unassigned incident awaiting triage. |
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Use the Timeclock system. The number in parentheses is the count of people currently clocked in. Shortcut: ALT+T |
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Show the timeclock popup, in order to clock in or out. |
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Open the search window, used to quickly find dispatches, patient records, and facility records. Shortcut: ALT+G |
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Visit the Crew Home page. Shortcut: ALT+C |
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Access the external email system provided by your company, if any. The icon will appear only if you've configured the URL for the external email system, by visiting the "Online Resources" tab of the Business Identification item under Settings. |
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Logout of AngelTrack. Shortcut: ALT+X |