By Sarah Roebuck
EMS1
Sixteen EMS, patient safety and public policy organizations have released a joint statement on EMS Performance Metrics.
The statement urges EMS systems and community leaders to prioritize patient-centered care by using a comprehensive set of clinical, safety, experiential, equity, operational and financial measures to evaluate EMS system effectiveness.
The organizations joining the statement are:
- Academy of International Mobile Healthcare Integration
- American Ambulance Association
- American College of Emergency Physicians
- American College of Surgeons – Committee on Trauma
- American Paramedic Association
- Center for Patient Safety
- International Academies of Emergency Dispatch
- International Association of EMS Chiefs
- International City/County Management Association
- National Association of EMS Physicians
- National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians
- National Association of State EMS Officials
- National EMS Management Association
- National EMS Quality Alliance
- National Volunteer Fire Council
- Paramedic Chiefs of Canada
These associations recommend that communities and governments modernize EMS performance assessments by evaluating various domains with key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should be measured, tracked over time, benchmarked against similar EMS systems or national data and regularly published for local community stakeholders.
According to the statement, the domains communities should consider when evaluating an EMS system or agency include:
- Effective: Is the healthcare provided clinically appropriate and high quality?
- Safe: Are services being provided in a way that is clinically and operationally safe for patients, responders and the community?
- Satisfying: How do patients and EMS clinicians feel about the service being provided?
- Equitable: Is the system providing care that is equitable based on patient demographics and service area geography?
- Efficient: Is this service being provided in a way that maximizes the use of economic and operational resources?
“Historically, response time performance has been the primary measure used to assess the quality of an EMS system. However, response times have not generally been associated with improved patient outcomes in the growing body of EMS evidence and research, and the reliance on response time performance prevents communities from evaluating other EMS system quality measures that have greater significance for patient care and outcomes,” states Dr. Doug Kupas, the primary author of the joint statement.
Matt Zavadsky, one of the contributing authors of the statement, added: “This joint statement is the second major collaboration for most of these national and international associations, representing a significant coalescence of these associations, including public policy makers, to help ensure that evidence-based clinical, operational, experiential and financial measures are used to more appropriately evaluate system performance.”
To read the statement in full, click here.
