The Power of Data to Affect Patient Outcomes

In my role as the EMS Coordinator for St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Northern Kentucky, I’m the interface between EMS agencies in the area and our hospitals. A big part of our mission is to be a community force that’s visible, transparent and achieves superior patient outcomes. But to do that, good data and processes were necessary.   For us, the journey really began in 2015, when we started researching the best ways to get access to prehospital data from our EMS agency partners and bring that data into the ED. We felt that closer collaboration with EMS would provide much better services for the patients in our community, so we made an investment in a technology platform provided by ESO to help facilitate the sharing of data and information. Interestingly, it also helped us address a few other issues, including making the documentation process easier, providing us with measurable insights that we could actually act upon, and even helped decrease staff fatigue. We have five hospitals and receive patients from 35 EMS agencies, resulting in about 35,000 transports a year. The high volume of EMS runs each day left our hospital staff constantly chasing down documents, billing information and other data necessary to meet reporting requirements, which led to frustration and fatigue. As a matter of fact, our health information management department had mountains of paperwork, and they were often leaving work early from migraines as a result of spending hours looking up details ...
Source: JEMS Special Topics - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Exclusive Articles Operations Source Type: news