It’s the latest in patient transfer and movement technology and now EMSA has it. It’s called the hover mat and hover jack, inflatable forms that work on jets of air. “This is going to be a whole lot easier to get them not only out of their house but up off the ground” EMSA paramedic Michael Ginn told KRMG news at a demonstration Monday.

EMSA’s Chris Stevens told us these mats work exactly like a hovercraft “It shoves a bunch or air through tiny little pinholes and makes basically a cushion of air to move on.” Stevens told us the mats will make a lot of things easier and safer for both EMSA paramedics and patients. “A patient that normally would take six or eight people to move, this thing makes it easy for two to four so it cuts your workload in half” Stevens noted.

Another huge advantage for the medics is the ability to maneuver the mats. Something their large gurneys can’t do. “One thing they are not is flexible” Stevens said about the old cots. But the new mats will adapt “the nice thing about these is even when they are inflated, they’re pliable” he said. Stevens went on “you can push the side of one of them in to make it go around a corner or a coffee table or a couch for instance.”

Click here to listen to the entire interview with Chris.

It looks like a camp mattress, does that mean they are flimsy? Not even a little bit. “The hover mat will hold up to 1,200 pounds” he beamed as he told KRMG. Check out the video below to see how easy it was to pull a person up thin stairs at the EMSA headquarters.

http://bcove.me/sqd5d716

Once a patient is on the mat, they can easily be moved around the room and Ginn said, even up stairs. “That was one of the major problems was going up and down stairs with elderly and larger patients to make them feel at ease.” With this, they won’t even feel it.”

The medics wanted to show how easy it would be to move a larger patient around so they looked around the room and, you guessed it, they picked me. I lay in the hover jack and the guys inflated the bed and then with one hand, moved me around the room. The technology is neat, and effective.

Ginn also thinks the new mats will cut down on injuries to medics. “The main injuries we sustain here in the EMS profession is lower back injuries from lifting patients improperly, this is going to cut down on this drastically.”

The extended interview with Ginn and Michael Espinosa as they talk about the mats.

Once as patient is on the hover mat they can be transferred to the hover jack and when all the air chambers are filled, the patient will be four feet off the ground.

The mats don’t replace the old, large gurneys. In order to transport a patient in an ambulance the patient will still need to be transferred to a gurney which will then be locked into the vehicle.

EMSA currently has one set of the new mats for Oklahoma City and one for Tulsa but expect to add more of the $7,000 mats to be added if they work as well as they believe they will.