Introducing DispatchCare: community paramedicine on VectorCare

Hospitals coordinate care well inside the building. The moment a patient leaves, the thread drops. Community paramedicine (CP) and mobile integrated healthcare (MIH) programs exist to pick it back up — post-discharge follow-ups, heart failure and COPD checks, falls, treat-in-place, hospice support — and they work. What does not work is how they are run.

The eleven fax machines move outside the building

We have written before about the coordination layer inside a hospital: the phone calls, the fax machines, the spreadsheet that one person maintains. Community paramedicine inherits all of it and adds distance. A case manager identifies a patient who would benefit from a paramedic visit at home, and then leaves the chart to make it happen — an email to the program coordinator, a call to the agency, a text to confirm the crew, and a result that arrives days later, if at all, in a form nobody can report on.

Every program we spoke to described the same three failures: referrals that never get made because the workflow is too heavy, visits that happen but are invisible to the referring clinician, and outcomes that cannot be proven to the people funding the program.

What a care mission is

DispatchCare turns that into one record: the care mission. A mission carries who referred it and why, which protocol applies, the visit window, the agency and crew that accepted it, and what happened when they arrived. It is created in the chart, broadcast to credentialed agencies, completed in the field, and closed with an outcome that the referrer and the program both see.

It is deliberately narrow. DispatchCare is not a 911 CAD, not an ePCR and not an EHR. Crews keep the ePCR they already use. DispatchCare sits above those systems the way VectorCare sits above a provider''s dispatch software — the coordination layer between the people who need something done and the credentialed teams who can do it.

Why we built it on SoFaaS and the network

We could have built a community paramedicine application from scratch. We did not, because three of the hardest parts were already shipped.

The first is the chart. Launching inside Epic, Oracle Health, MEDITECH, athenahealth and other SMART on FHIR systems is the difference between a referral that happens and one that does not, and SoFaaS — SMART on FHIR as a Service — already handles the launch sequence, the FHIR mapping and the EHR review process. DispatchCare went from concept to in-chart product on the same layer our health-system customers and third-party vendors use.

The second is the network. Getting a mission to the right agency by territory, protocol and capacity is a broadcast problem, and VectorCare has been solving it for transport, home health and DME for years. Community-care missions ride the same engine, with the same credentialing.

The third is evidence. Every mission is timestamped from referral to visit to outcome, which is what turns a pilot into a funded program. Insights reporting was already there.

That is the argument for infrastructure, and DispatchCare is the first vertical product we have built on our own platform to prove it.

Who it is for

Hospitals and health systems running — or standing up — a CP/MIH program get a referral path from inside the chart and follow-up their readmission numbers can feel. Fire departments and EMS agencies receive scheduled missions instead of phone calls. Payers get the utilization evidence that makes paying for community paramedics defensible. And states get something they can actually fund.

Rural Health Transformation

The Rural Health Transformation program puts real money in front of state health departments, and much of it will pass through to rural hospitals and EMS agencies as subawards. Software that already produces the reporting fields CMS asks for — with non-supplantation guidance built in — is a line item a subrecipient can budget and a state can approve. DispatchCare packages software, onboarding and an outcomes pack for exactly that.

DispatchCare is a VectorCare product, not a separate company. It has its own home at dispatchcare.com because its buyers are different from our core hospital logistics buyers. If you want the short version of how it runs on our infrastructure, that is on our DispatchCare page.