State EMS Office Memo 1606

At the October 2016 EMS Board meeting, the System Quality and Data Committee reviewed the current status and the dates associated with the transition to WARDS Elite. They still encourage all services to make the transition by January 1, 2017, if at all possible. This would allow all of Wisconsin’s data to continue being shared with the NEMSIS national database. The January 1, 2017, date also provides a clean cut-off date for all services when running reports. Any data entered prior to the cut-off date would come from WARDS, while any data entered after that date will be available in WARDS Elite.

Because NEMSIS will not extend their December 31, 2016 transition date and will only accept v2 data through December 31, 2016, the System Quality and Data Committee recommended extending the transition date an additional three months. Therefore, all services will have until March 31, 2017, to complete the migration. To allow services to enter any data occurring through March 31, 2017, Wisconsin will maintain the WARDS database until June 30, 2017. During this time we will work with our vendor, ImageTrend, to combine the WARDS data with the WARDS Elite data so everyone will only need to access one database for any reports going forward.

To migrate to WARDS Elite your Service Director needs to email the EMS office at dhsemssmail@Wisconsin.gov.