By Jamie Thompson
EMS1 Senior Editor
ATLANTA — GPS technology will have a major impact on the way EMS response times are logged and recorded, a session at EMS Expo in Atlanta was told Thursday.
Mic Gunderson, who has been involved in service industries for more than 30 years in managerial and provider roles, outlined a range of new approaches to the analysis and improvement of EMS response times.
He said as advances are made in GPS, EMS will see the technology used to not only better track vehicles but the movements of equipment and even personnel.
“If we put the GPS equipment on the stretchers and even on crew members themselves, it will be able to sense when we are actually at the patient,” Gunderson said.
“This has been a difficult thing for a system to do, to get reliable time stamps when actually making patient contact.”
Gunderson told the session the use of such technology will also allow EMS to record the length of time it takes for a patient to be transported to the ambulance and then to hospital with greater accuracy.
“Having this data will allow us to better determine what is happening in our care process and to make changes to them accordingly,” he said.
Gunderson, who is president of Integral Performance Solutions, focused much of the session on how EMS response times are measured. He said conversations with clients and attendees at conferences often center on the issue of EMS agencies only seeming to be evaluated on their response interval performances.
“While I would agree it’s not appropriate to just look at the EMS response intervals on evaluating performance of an EMS system, there are three main reasons it will remain in use,” he told the session
“First of all, time does matter. There’s a lot of time sensitive issues we deal with. They also matter financially. Short response interval targets will require more resources to put on the street to meet that target.
“It’s also an important criteria because if you’re failing to meet community expectations for response interval performance; obviously the patient will be upset with you for not arriving in what they perceive to be a timely manner.”
During the session, Gunderson contrasted using performance indexes against the methods traditionally used in EMS to measure response intervals such as averages and 90th fractiles.
“Is getting there sooner better … if I get there in 5 minutes instead of 6 minutes, if I get there in 8 minutes instead of 12?” he said.
“I think at least for cardiac arrest, the answer seems to be yes. But the way in which we construct our metrics, the way in which we evaluate response interval performance in most systems today gives no recognition whatsoever that arriving sooner is better and later is worse.”