NCDR eReports EMS

Clinical Performance Requirements

Overview: Please join Mic Gunderson with guest panelists Jeff Jarvis MD, Tom Wieczorek and Glenn Leland along with moderator Tom Bouthillet as we explore the issues and implementation of clinical performance requirements for public, private and volunteer EMS providers.

Through research, we know that clinical interventions by EMS make a difference in outcomes. However, most EMS agencies are assessed primarily on their response time by local municipalities and regulatory agencies, even though this is just one element of EMS response.

EMS should be about more than response times. But what other measures of clinical performance should apply in performance-based contracts with private ambulance services and through performance standards in publicly operated services?

We'll answer this question and more in our next webinar on Clinical Performance Requirements in EMS.

EMS Clinical Specialist

Overview: Watch Mic Gunderson, with moderators Tom Bouthillet and Tim Phalan, in the final installment of the series on the Team-Based Quality Model. It is envisioned that EMS Clinical Specialist are educated in very specific clinical areas, similar to the way clinical nurse specialists and physician fellows are educated.  The clinical education in their specialty goes far beyond standard paramedic curricula and is complemented by intensive education in management, adult education, research, and quality methods. This is all done in preparation for their roles in leadership of EMS clinical specialty teams (described in a prior webinars) and potentially opens a much larger set of career options for them.

Watch this webinar to learn:

• The role and responsibilities of an EMS clinical specialist
• The didactic training and experiential learning used for training EMS Clinical Specialists
• How communities can work collaboratively to establish EMS Clinical Specialist training programs

Project Teams, Charters and Senior Management

Overview: Watch Mic Gunderson, with moderators Tom Bouthillet and Tim Phalan, in the latest installment of the free "EMS and Systems of Care Webinar Series." In this webinar they continue to drill down in the details of the team-based clinical quality model.

This webinar goes further into the details of the team-based clinical quality model with:

• Ad hoc improvement project teams
• The project charter document that defines work and deliverables
• The crucial role played by the senior management team
• The relationship between ad hoc project improvement teams and the clinical specialty teams that recommend their formation

After completing this module, attendees have the information needed to write their own project charters, secure senior management team feedback and support, and make ad hoc improvement project teams an integral part of their quality programs.

Clinical Specialty Teams: Expanding Your Clinical Quality Program Capacity

Overview: Clinical Specialty Teams are small groups of staff members who share a passion for care in a clinical area, such as, cardiac arrest, STEMI, trauma, stroke, pediatrics, or airway management.

These teams are empowered by the medical director and senior management team to take responsibility for a specific clinical area by:

• Measuring quality.
• Proposing improvement and research project ideas.
• Recommending protocol, policy and equipment changes.
• Serving as subject matter experts in development of training and continuing education content.

This Webinar gives details of how to put these teams together in your EMS organization or hospital to help them thrive!

Structuring Your System for Quality

Overview: Watch Mic Gunderson, with moderators Tom Bouthillet and Tim Phalen, as they discuss strategies to improve capacity and maximize quality in your system of care. The entire EMS System, including 9-1-1 centers, non-transport medical first response agencies, ambulance services and hospitals, must modify its strategies and tactics in order to improve quality of care.

This webinar:

• Highlights some needs differences between individual organizations and systems
• Shows ways that systems can adopt different structures and tactics to their infrastructure and capabilities to improve quality and efficiency

Structuring Your Organization for Quality

Overview: This webinar introduces strategies to dramatically expand an EMS agency’s capacity to do quality improvement projects.

Often in EMS agencies the responsibility of quality improvement lies with the quality manager. One person is responsible for gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and reporting the data; as well as, resolving clinical incidents and complaints and providing education. This leaves little time for actual quality improvement projects. Join this webinar to learn some strategies to increase capacity to do quality improvement projects.

Making the Leap to Improvement Science

• A historical overview of quality management in healthcare and EMS, the EMS Compass project and its evolution into the National EMS Quality Alliance
• An examination of how the typical EMS or hospital quality program's improvement projects can benefit from a more rigorous approach that directly applies the principles and tools of the scientific method - commonly referred to as improvement science
• Learn the difference between quality assurance and improvement - and why both are needed for quality strategy
• See an example of a resuscitation systems of care that illustrates the calculation of quality, cost and value