Several months ago Rob Lawrence of the Richmond Ambulance Authority started a thread on the High Performance EMS Group of LinkedIn by asking “So what does the phrase ‘High Performance EMS’ mean to you?”  This innocent sounding question sparked immediate debate even within the small group at that time.  Benjamin Podsiadlo of AMR quickly tied the quality of EMS performance to “experience” and “outcomes” stating further that “response time is not an evidence based factor in ALS performance.”  He later backed up his assertion by writing that “the catch 22 of pushing the workforce to be responsible and accountable drivers while simultaneously achieving narrow response time goals to the vast majority incidents that have no medical need for such high speed driving is also a bizarre and irresponsible contradiction.”  This is a point that even Lawrence admits could foster the “mentality of ‘arrive on time and the patient dies – good outcome, arrive late and the patient lives – bad outcome’” that has already been affecting common sense both in the UK and increasingly in the US since NFPA 1710 set response time standards several years ago.

While there were other good comments, I would like to focus on the specific assertion that measuring response time (a well established practice today such as at Huron Valley Ambulance’s public web Performance Dashboard) is not an “evidence-based” practice.  There are many specific accounts of individual lives saved that I have heard mentioned by different agencies, but I will concede that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.  However, one of the best stories of response time saving lives was made on February 9 when Richard Sposa of Jersey City Medical Center EMS discussed an interesting finding in a recent webcast.  The chart reproduced here shows a correlation between (more…)