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The Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC) is one of twenty-two regional councils in Texas that comprise the Texas Trauma/Emergency Healthcare system. STRAC's membership currently includes 53 hospitals, including 2 Level I Trauma Centers, 14 PCI centers, and 11 Stroke centers, and has 71 EMS agencies.
STRAC is a 501c3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization, with the charge of developing and implementing the regional trauma and emergency healthcare system for the 22 county region in and around San Antonio, TX called Trauma Service Area - P (TSA-P). TSA-P has a mixture of urban, suburban rural and frontier areas, from the 7th largest city in the US to the Mexican border, encompassing over 26,000 square miles in southwest Texas.
STRAC has been a leader in Texas Trauma System development, and has been recognized twice as the state RAC of the Year (2000 and 2008). STRAC has several key initiatives underway, including a region-wide EMS electronic patient charting system, ZollData's TabletPCR. The project manages approximately 200,000 EMS runs in TSA-P, which is greater than 95% of all runs.
STRAC also hosts and oversees the 12-lead EKG field transmission project, which is critical to decrease EMS to Balloon (E2B) times in the San Antonio area.
The state health department selected STRAC to lead the statewide WebEOC software initiative, called the Texas WebEOC Interoperability Project (TWIRP). TWIRP interconnects over 35 jurisdictional servers across Texas and provides connectivity, information sharing and resource requests statewide, allowing a common operating picture for state and local officials during disaster.
STRAC also has a Personal Identification Verification (PIV) ID card project for all hospital-based physicians and Fire/EMS personnel in the region. This FIPS201-compliant ID card allows both physical access to buildings, by a centralized database, and also enables physicians to access hospital-based computer networks for Health-IT information.
STRAC has developed rapid triage and response systems for time-dependent pathologies, including Trauma Alert, Stroke Alert and Heart Alert protocols that are implemented region-wide.
STRAC maintains a mature Regional Trauma Registry, and has begun development on registries in three other critical areas; ICU, cardiac and stroke.
The STRAC leadership is comprised of dedicated physicians, surgeons, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare, public safety, public health and IT personnel dedicated to the developing a model of excellence for regional emergency healthcare.
