How new features on Geisinger Life Flight helicopters will help save lives

Changes aboard Geisinger Life Flight helicopters could help save lives.

Right now, Life Flight is in a feasibility study for using pre-hospital ultrasounds to perform Extended Focused Assessment With Sonography for Trauma exams, said Jeff Brytczuk, a flight paramedic who’s based out of State College. Emergency departments already conduct these exams, which check patients’ lungs, hearts and organs of the abdomen for internal bleeding.

Using a device about the size of a smartphone (with a probe connected by wire), the Life Flight teams are able to do the ultrasound and transmit the images directly to the receiving physician at the trauma center, he said. The physician is then seeing what they’re seeing in real time, and they can direct their care from there.

Brytczuk said he thinks the feasibility study will run until enough data’s been collected to see whether it’s worthwhile.

Hopefully, he said, they get them into the regular treatment regiment fairly quickly.

In addition, Life Flight helicopters will start carrying blood on the aircraft, he said. With the ultrasounds being able to identify internal injuries, flight paramedics and nurses will be able to start blood products immediately if needed.

“All of this ... increases the patient’s survivability (and) decreases their hospitalization times,” Brytczuk said.

Being able to get blood to a patient who needs it “greatly” decreases the chance of mortality, he said.

Brytczuk said he’s “extremely excited” about the change.

“The blood is huge because obviously it’s what the body needs,” he said.

He described the Life Flight helicopter as basically a “mini ICU.”

There are six Life Flight bases across Pennsylvania, with State College being the farthest west. There are four full-time flight nurses (and a part-time nurse), four flight paramedics and four pilots in State College. The helicopter, stationed at the University Park Airport, does about 75 to 100 flights monthly — 65 percent of which are interfacility transfers and the other 35 percent of which are 911 calls, according to Brytczuk.