Your local EMS system got a rare gift last year: a budget increase. Now, though, council members want to make sure their funds were well spent, and specifically that they helped you reduce response times and improve cost recovery. They want an update from the chief at their next meeting.
Assembling this begins with pulling some data from dispatch. The chief finds an average response time of 6:42 and a 90th-percentile time of 9:10 – not bad.
Transport and patient data come from patient care reports, for which the service uses a different vendor. ePCRs show 8,900 total incidents, with 6,200 transports and 2,700 nontransports. But already numbers are starting to diverge – some CAD incidents never became PCRs, some PCRs don’t cleanly match CAD incident numbers, device readings that helped shape transport decisions aren’t all accurately reflected in ePCRs, and time stamps aren’t always aligned.
Billing data from a third source complicates things further: It shows 5,750 billable transports. That’s a discrepancy, the chief realizes – 6,200 transports but only 5,750 billed – council members might flag. And while he can explain documentation delays, medical necessity denials, data mismatches and excluded payer types, it all may sound to councilors and the public like inefficiency and excuses.
Now consider a different timeline – one where dispatch, patient care reports, device data and billing are all handled and enhanced by an integrated and compatible suite of software and acute care medical products developed to work together.