Atlas and Database of Air Medical Services (ADAMS) - Helicopter ...

1 INTRODUCTION
ADAMS
The “Atlas and Database of Air Medical Services” (ADAMS), is a compilation of information on air
medical services in the United States who respond to the scene of a trauma or medical emergency, or who provide
emergency (or scheduled) inter-hospital transport. ADAMS currently contains detailed descriptive and geographic
information on air medical rotor wing (RW) and fixed wing (FW) services, including information on their corporate
office, airport and helipad bases, communication center, rotor wing and fixed wing aircraft and the major hospitals
and trauma centers which receive their emergency transports. It is believed that more than 95% of RW services and
90% of FW services are included in ADAMS. The ADAMS database includes all types of air medical organizations
including for-profit and not-for profit, dual-use public service (police/fire), as well as several military units who
routinely provide transport for civilian victims in remote areas or during poor weather conditions.
ADAMS is more than a standard tabulation of air medical services. First, ADAMS includes both corporate
and satellite base locations for each service as well as the FAA registration numbers (N#) for all RW and FW
aircraft utilized for trauma scene response and inter-hospital transport. Second, ADAMS is structured as a
relational database, an important distinction since it allows data to be accessed, extracted or reassembled in many
different ways without having to reorganize the original database tables. Third, the relational database has been
imported into a Geographic Information System (GIS), a software program which enables the user to view the
database in a map context and link various mapped objects with text information.
ADAMS is currently implemented in a web-based GIS. Password-protected portions of the ADAMS
website (containing descriptive data and interactive maps) are made available to registered air medical service
providers, regular AAMS members, Automatic Crash Notification (ACN) technology developers, disaster response
and homeland security groups, emergency medical and trauma system researchers, flight safety personnel and
researchers, and various public health and safety agencies. In addition, the ADAMS website contains data collection
web forms which enable registered air medical services (with appropriate password) to edit or add data for their own
service at any time. Modifications made on these webforms are regularly incorporated into the GIS.
This document is the 9th edition of the publicly available Atlas which contains national and state maps
showing air medical rotor and fixed wing base locations along with summary tables for each state. This document
is available on the public portion of the ADAMS website located at http://www.ADAMSairmed.org.
2 DATA PROCESSING
ADAMS data was collected using web forms customized for each Air Medical Service. The data were
subsequently imported into Microsoft ACCESS (relational database software) and then into the ESRI ARCView 8.3
GIS program. Street locations were geo-coded using the ArcView software coupled with the Arc GIS StreetMap
USA (2003) streets database. This geo-coding process essentially converts a street address to a latitude/longitude
and assigns an identifier to both a map feature and to a data record. The elevation data used to produce
topographical maps came from ESRI Data & Maps (2003). Finally, all maps were projected using the North
American Equidistant Conic Projection.
The maps shown here were created on a PC desk-top computer running Windows XP. The web-based
GIS contains a subset of the full ADAMS database and was created using ESRI ArcGIS Server (Version 9.3).
3 ORGANIZATION OF ATLAS
Section 4 provides a national map illustrating air medical rotor wing service coverage and fixed wing base
locations throughout the United States. In addition, a summary table and several bar charts provide detail on the
number of services in each state as well as the number of RW and FW bases and aircraft in each state. Also in Section
4 is a brief discussion of pediatric transport services. At the end of the section, two maps which highlight the changes
in the number of RW bases and RW aircraft (since last year) are presented.
One of the objectives for developing ADAMS is to help improve emergency medical response to car crash
scenes, given that such crashes are the leading cause of trauma in this country. Toward that end, Section 5 provides
two national maps showing current coverage of major roadways and current coverage of the US population by air
medical RW services. Section 6 provides a description of the individual state maps and state data tables which make
up the major portion of the Atlas. The actual maps and tables showing RW and FW base locations are provided in
Section 7. Finally, Appendix A provides statistics on the number of fatalities from car crashes during the last several
years. An alphabetical listing of all air medical services currently included in ADAMS is provided in Appendix B.
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