The Opportunity & Need for a Nuanced View of Prehospital Information

On the final day of the 2018 North Carolina EMS Expo, Stephen J. Howell, NRP, the EMS captain and coordinator at New Hanover Regional EMS, gave a talk audaciously titled “How Data Drives Success.” Having seen many such presentations over the years—many of which have fallen short of innovative or anything more than platitudes about the “need” to chart patient care for legal coverage, and a pining, fruitless, frankly overblown and never-really-explained desire to gain unfettered access to hospital-side electronic health records—I was curious. Mr. Howell offered a sophisticated overview of the value of prehospital information (not just data!) to EMS and Fire agencies, delivered in a state that still has parts underwater in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. He grasps the power of statistics, both to reveal unseen truths and to dig rabbit holes down which to tumble. Though not in so many words, he emphasized a vision of insight gleaned out of stochastic entropy (i.e., in non-math geek terms, increasing complexity and randomness that gets evermore confusing). The complexity of data is a plight of prehospital providers. But the more layered the available useful information, the more it can help with resource planning, clinical performance and even hiring. Nuanced data used well elucidate your agency’s excellence—and where it needs to improve. “Let the numbers do the talking” to optimize your budget, determine how (and whether) to deploy a mobile integrated hea...
Source: JEMS Special Topics - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Columns Exclusive Articles Mobile Integrated Healthcare Source Type: news