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HP-EMS Profile: Jersey City Medical Center EMS

The High Performance EMS we examine this month is Jersey City Medical Center EMS  located just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.  It is a triply accredited service, receiving the CAAS, NAED’s ACE, and CoAEMSP accreditations all in the same year.  As a part of the LibertyHealth System, it serves the residents, workers, and visitors of Hudson County, NJ by responding to nearly 90,000 calls a year.  JCMC EMS provides both Basic and Advanced Life Support as well as services for special operations, neonatal transfers, critical care inter-facility transports, regional EMS communications, and more.

Few modern ambulance services can claim over 100 years of history, but this organization has been providing prompt, professional pre-hospital care since the days of taking patients to the Medical Center in horse-drawn ambulances.  Today, however, JCMC EMS is one of the most technically advanced EMS agencies in the country with an impressive response time averaging 6:02 – well below the 7:59 city standard.

Richard Sposa, EMS Communications Coordinator at JCMC EMS, describes how they continually improve their service saying “positive patient outcomes are the goal for any EMS agency, and at Jersey City Medical Center, it is our guiding light.  The Jersey City Medical Center’s EMS Department has taken a leadership role in positive patient outcomes by examining real life scenarios.” More specifically Sposa says, “we made a self-realization in 2005 that the system as a whole was in need of improvement in a multitude of areas, and the most notable were our response time and asset deployment.  With the help of Bradshaw Consulting Services and the MARVLIS system we were able, in less than a years time, to reduce our response by over two minutes.”

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1 comment Posted by on November 22, 2011

HP-EMS Profile: Sedgwick County EMS

It has been much more than a month, but we will return to featuring a monthly profile of High Performance EMS sites in order to inspire others to reach beyond just compliant services to provide advanced out-of-hospital care while focusing on improved efficiency.  This time, our spotlight is on Sedgwick County Emergency Medical Service of Kansas.

Sedgwick County EMS

Sedgwick County EMS

The public EMS agency in Sedgwick County is responsible for ALS out-of-hospital care and transportation for both acutely ill and injured patients as well as providing scheduled ambulance transportation services within an area of 1,008 square miles serving a population of approximately 498,000 residents.  In 2010, Sedgwick County EMS responded to 52,815 calls for service.  They are also proud to be part of an elite group of CAAS accredited agencies across the nation signifying that they have voluntarily met the “gold standard” determined by the ambulance industry to be essential in a modern EMS provider.  The CAAS standards, which often exceed those established by state or local regulation, also define High Performance EMS as they are designed to increase operational efficiency and clinical quality while decreasing risk and liability to the organization.

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2 comments Posted by on October 26, 2011

Dynamic System Status Management

System Status Management (SSM) is the fluid deployment of ambulances based on the hour-of-the-day and day-of-the-week in order to match supply, defined as Unit Hours of Utilization (UHU), with expected demand, expressed as calls for service, in the attempt to provide faster response by locating ambulances at “posts” nearer their next calls.  While the practice is still not unanimously embraced by all services, it has a sound foundation both in the research literature dating back to the 1980′s as well as in practice today.  Experience has shown that ambulance response times can be dramatically decreased using this type of dynamic deployment, but it is also recognized that it is possible to reduce performance when these techniques are not applied properly.  The direction of the results of a system implementation are typically influenced by the system design, competence of the managers creating the plan, and commitment of the workforce in implementing it.  Therefore the best practice is a simple and straightforward implementation that will show positive results quickly.  This methodology ensures a positive return on investment along with garnering the necessary buy-in from staff to make the project a success.

In his article, “System Status Management – The Fact is, It’s Everywhere“,  published in the Journal of EMS (JEMS) magazine back in 1989, Jack Stout explained the concept of SSM and tried to dispel certain myths.  Based on foreseen Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and even general computing capabilities of that time, it was quite logical to assume in his Myth #2 that “no matter how thoroughly the response zone concept is fine-tuned in practice, it cannot be made to cope effectively with the dynamic realties of the EMS environment.”  But systems implemented today around the US are capable of calculating dynamic response zones in a small fraction of a second while even being based on time-aware historic driving patterns making a truly dynamic system status management process a reality.  A practical and proven example of a dynamically functioning system status management application is the Mobile Area Vehicle Routing and Location Information System, or simply MARVLIS.

The following Slideshare presentation does an excellent job of telling the story of why and how the system works:

High Performance EMS is MARVLIS[slideshare id=8765718&w=425&h=355&sc=no]

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7 comments Posted by on August 8, 2011

HP-EMS Profile: MEDIC

Each month we will feature a profile of another High Performance EMS to show the variation in these services and inspire others to reach beyond just the basic services to provide advanced pre-hospital care with a focus on high economic efficiency.

In 1996, the Mecklenburg EMS agency was one of the slowest in the US with an average call response time of about 16 minutes.  Today, calls average around 7 minutes.  That incredible transformation began when two competing hospital services joined together to create MEDIC which now contracts to serve the county of 540 square miles with a fixed population of 850,000 that swells to a routine daytime total of around 1 million people.

MEDIC Emergency Dispatch Center

Barry Bagwell, Deputy Director of Operations, is proud to state that MEDIC has been compliant regarding performance every month since 1998.  “While there is no ‘silver bullet’, all of the pieces must work together,” says Barry, “it requires technology plus the people to run it.”  But a truly High Performance EMS must not be tempted to over-utilize response times as the only measure of success. The original focus for system improvement was on routing, but the partnership with Bradshaw Consulting Services has led to many operational (more…)

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No comments Posted by on June 2, 2011

The Future of Prediction

I have read the positions stating that calls for emergency services are completely random (justifying the reason they are often called “accidents”) and therefore not able to be predicted.  But both academic literature and practical experience show that demand prediction can be an effective tool in helping to balance scarce resources (ambulances and their trained crews) with public demand (requests for emergency responses even without taking into account the abuses to the system as discussed in a previous posting on the problem of “frequent flyers”) while still improving response times and controlling costs.

For anyone who thinks all of this sounds too good to be true, there are examples of where expensive technology is not having the desired affect.  One such location is Lee County EMS in Florida where not only have response times not been improved, but ambulances are burning more fuel than ever and the critics include the very paramedics it is supposed to help.  While predicting where the next 911 call will come from may be similiar to ”picking the winning card at a casino” as the Florida investigative news reporter suggests, that isn’t really the objective.  We don’t need to know which phone will make the next call, it is enough just knowing the probability of a call coming from any given location within the service area.  This may be a subtle distinction, but one that makes a huge difference at MedStar in Fort Worth or Life EMS in Grand Rapids where response times were dramatically improved by taking the next step beyond simple demand prediction and placing ambulances at positions where they can be the most effective.

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1 comment Posted by on March 1, 2011