VectorCare Launches Air Ambulance App for Epic

Air medical transfers are supposed to happen fast. A rural hospital has a stroke patient. The nearest comprehensive stroke center is ninety minutes away by ground. Helicopter's got the flight time in thirty-five. That's what you're paying for: speed.

But the transfer itself? It stalls. A nurse calls the receiving hospital. Hold music. The receiving hospital checks ICU capacity. They check what they've got staffed. They call back. The rural hospital's coordinator starts making calls. Which fixed-wing company is available? Which rotor-wing provider? Two companies, two coordinators, two wait times.

By the time the decision is made, thirty minutes are gone.

The air medical market is projected to reach $4 billion by 2032. That's how critical it is. And it's stuck in phone calls and fax machines. That's the problem we solved.

What Changed

Today, we're launching the VectorCare Air Ambulance app on Epic App Showroom. Over 51% of registered air providers in the country are already on the VectorCare network. That's fixed-wing and rotor-wing operators, critical access hospitals, Level 1 trauma centers, and rural EDs all connected through the same dispatch layer.

Here's what changed. A rural hospital coordinator submits an air transfer request directly from the patient's Epic chart. The system extracts what it needs automatically: patient acuity, weight, mobility restrictions, destination. That request goes to every available provider at once. No serial calling. No "try this one first, then this one." Parallel requests. Simultaneous availability checks.

Providers see the request, check their capacity and flight availability, and respond instantly. A critical access hospital gets an answer in seconds. Not minutes. Not after being in a phone queue and waiting for someone to check the board.

Why Air Medical Was the Next Step

David Emanuel, VectorCare's founder, said it best: "We built the PACE app to fix recurring transportation. We built this to fix the cases where seconds matter." Air medical is the edge case that justifies the entire infrastructure.

The app handles something most dispatch systems miss: fixed-wing and rotor-wing aren't alternatives. They're complements. A critically stable patient might need a fixed-wing transfer with two medical crew. Another patient needs the speed of rotor-wing because they're unstable. The operator needs to understand both options. The provider network needs both capabilities.

Before and After

Before the app, here's what happened: A critical access hospital stabilizes a patient who needs higher-level care. The coordinator opens Epic, writes down the patient's vitals and weight. She calls one air provider. On hold for three minutes. They're grounded for maintenance. She calls another. On hold for two minutes. They're prepping for a different transfer. She calls a third, gets voicemail. She texts the EMS coordinator. Thirty-five minutes later, she's got an ambulance coming from forty miles away that's not a perfect fit but it's available.

After the app: Coordinator submits the transfer request from Epic. Patient data is already in the system. The request goes to twelve available providers at once. Nine respond within forty seconds. Provider A has rotor-wing available in twelve minutes. Provider B has fixed-wing available in eighteen with better range. Coordinator sees all options and picks the best fit. Total time to answer: ninety seconds.

Fixed-Wing and Rotor-Wing in One Workflow

Fixed-wing and rotor-wing operators live in different worlds. Fixed-wing is scheduled, longer-distance, more staffing flexibility. Rotor-wing is immediate, weather-dependent, higher cost, shorter range. A dispatch system that treats them as one network, not two competing options, lets hospital coordinators think about logistics instead of vendor preferences.

The app is built on SMART on FHIR. Epic already has the data. We're opening the connection. When a coordinator requests an air transfer, the receiving hospital's bed status, staffing model, and equipment capabilities flow through the same channel. The transfer is no longer just "are you available?" It's "what can you take?"

Early Results

We launched with four air operators and two major hospital networks. In the first six weeks, the app processed 847 transfer requests. That's 847 times a hospital saved the time it used to spend calling five vendors. Some of those transfers were time-critical. For those, the app didn't just save time. It changed the margin.

The larger vision is connecting every transportation network that health systems depend on: air, ground, inter-facility, intra-facility. Right now they're disconnected. A hospital has an air medical contract. It has a ground ambulance service. It has its own shuttle fleet. None of them talk to each other because they're built on different infrastructure. We're building the layer underneath that makes them one network.

For air operators, the app means visibility into demand they couldn't reach before. For hospitals, it means access to the full market instead of whoever picks up the phone. For patients, it means thirty fewer seconds waiting. Sometimes that's the difference.