“We’re never going to be the same.” So said Ed Racht, M.D., keynoter at the Pinnacle EMS Leadership Forum, held in July in San Diego, about the implications of health care reform. Ed had made his own news the day before, when American Medical Response announced he had been appointed to the newly created role of chief medical officer for the country’s largest ambulance provider.
For the past several years, Ed has been away from EMS, serving as chief medical officer for Piedmont Newnan Hospital in Georgia. Prior to that he was the medical director of Austin-Travis County EMS in Texas and was considered one of the most influential figures in the profession.
Ed spoke to leading executives and chiefs about health care reform from his perspective as both an EMS insider and hospital executive. Going through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act section by section, he laid out the case for an increasing role for EMS in the patient encounter, especially as more and more pressure is brought to bear on hospitals to reduce costs. Health care reform is a “call to arms” for EMS, he said, in terms of doing a better job of triaging patients, doing more in prevention, and working with other health care providers to avoid hospital readmissions, a priority of the reform package. If EMS is given an incentive not to transport every patient, he said, the results “could be huge.”
Ed punctuated his talk with a quote from Thomas Edison:
it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
The fact that EMS was only mentioned four times in the entire Act, he said, just points to the need—and opportunity—to define our role in reform and educate those in a position to make a difference.
In other news from the meeting, Troy Hagen, director of Ada County (Idaho) Paramedics, received the Pinnacle Award of Excellence, given each year to an individual or agency representing the best of the profession. Troy was the lead author on the highly acclaimed white paper “EMS Makes a Difference,” a product of the National EMS Advisory Committee. He examined some 400 studies spanning two decades to write the report.
“There is all kinds of literature out there about EMS, but typically research tries to answer one question at a time,” he said. “To our knowledge, no one had taken a global look at all the research that’s been done.” (For an interview with Troy and more information on the white paper, see the May 2010 issue of Best Practices.) Having worked with Troy on the board of the National EMS Management Association, I know how much work and leadership he put into this issue, and many more that haven’t received the same attention.
Pinnacle 2011 will be held July 25–29 in Miami Beach.
Keith Griffiths can be reached at publisher@emergencybestpractices.com.
