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Revolutionizing Car Crash Response

Collaboration to provide faster, more precise care to help save lives

In the near future, vehicles may be able to alert emergency crews to how severe the injuries are in a car crash and victims should be taken for the best care. That scenario could result in a decrease of 25 percent in traffic fatalities and a decrease in disabilities resulting from crash injuries. The GM Foundation announced in March a partnership with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the CDC Foundation to provide real-time information through OnStar that will allow emergency medical responders to determine the level of care that crash victims will need before emergency crews arrive at the scene.

Real-Time Teamwork

Dr. Richard Hunt director of CDC's Injury Center's Division of Injury Response said "CDC-supported research has shown that care at a trauma center lowers the risk of death by 25 percent for severely injured patients compared with treatment received at a hospital without trauma care services." Under the partnership, CDC will convene a panel of more than 20 emergency medical physicians, trauma surgeons, and public safety and vehicle safety experts to review real-time crash data from OnStar's Advanced Automatic Crash Notification (AACN) vehicle telematic system and similar systems from other companies to help improve emergency transport and treatment of crash victims. The panel meetings will be funded by a $250,000 grant from OnStar and the GM Foundation to the CDC Foundation.

According to Dr. Hunt the partnership is "groundbreaking in the field of emergency services." It will utilize real-time information to get severely injured patients to the right medical facility in a critical amount of time. This real-time crash data will also result in a decrease in injury severity and a decrease in long-term disability. "This really matters," Hunt added.

The CDC Foundation is chartered by Congress to seek out innovative relationships between the private sector and the CDC with a focus on national health problems. "I believe this will, in reality, change the face of emergency medical care and save thousands of lives," said Charles Stokes, president of the CDC Foundation.

Using a collection of sensors, vehicle telemetry systems like OnStar send crash data to an advisor if the vehicle is involved in a moderate or severe front, rear or side-impact crash. Depending on the type of system, the data includes crash severity information, along with data on the direction of impact, airbag deployment, multiple impacts and a rollover (if equipped with appropriate sensors). Advisors can relay this information to emergency dispatchers helping them to quickly determine the appropriate combination of emergency personnel, equipment and medical facilities needed.

Traffic safety and emergency medical experts say data from vehicle telematic systems like AACN may be especially important in rural or isolated areas where there may not be a passerby to report a crash and resources of a level I trauma center are too far away to treat the kind of injuries sustained in severe crashes. For example, 60 percent of the nation's fatalities are in rural areas, even though rural areas account for only 20 percent of total annual crashes. AACN, first introduced on the 2004 Chevy Malibu, evolved from airbag deployment notification systems, which alert OnStar Advisors if a subscriber's airbag has deployed. Airbag deployment notification systems have been on OnStar-equipped vehicles since 1997.

OnStar is available on more than 50 of the 2007 GM models and includes one year of service. It will become standard on nearly all GM vehicles by the end of 2007. There are more than 4.5 million subscribers in the U.S. and OnStar retains two-thirds of its subscribers after the first year. Since its inception, OnStar has worked with emergency medical groups to refine its technology. "They gave us leadership on where to apply our technology to get the best benefit for emergency medicine and we have been guided by that." Chet Huber, OnStar president said. OnStar logs 1,100 airbag deployment notifications a month and 700 of those come from the AACN system. Over the last 10 years, OnStar has logged 50,000 crash responses and 620,000 emergency calls.