The draft White Paper titled “Innovation Opportunities for Emergency Medical Services” (EMS) was prepared jointly by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) within HHS and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration within DOT.
Today, overcrowded emergency departments result in costly delays and often sub-optimal care. EMS contribute to the problem by unnecessarily transporting non-acutely ill or injured patients to EDs when more appropriate and less costly care settings might be available.
Innovation in the emergency services field, may change the model of acute care to one that is more patient-centered where the patient is evaluated in their home or current location and triaged to an appropriate care setting. For example, the white paper points out that it would be a good idea to encourage clinic-based healthcare providers to accept more unscheduled visits.
Using innovative approaches and developing new finance models have not touched EMS agencies, emergency departments, physicians, and urgent care centers since Medicare was established.
The emergency services field needs to develop a full systems approach to transforming unscheduled care in a patient-centered manner to save money, reduce the burden on emergency departments, and increase the quality of care provided to beneficiaries.
HHS and DOT developed a theoretical Model in the White Paper along with background materials to enable emergency medical services to achieve savings but at the same time, adopt innovative strategies to treat patients.
Specifically the development process should include analyzing data in an EMS jurisdiction to calculate the percent of low acuity patients that could be safely managed in non-emergency departments and also examine emergency department data to determine the number of EMS transports discharged from the emergency department within 24 hours.
It is also necessary to study the data to analyze how many patients could be treated outside of the emergency department, how many of these patients could safely be treated in clinics or urgent care, and how many could be treated and released by EMS providers.
HHS and DOT anticipate that the Model described in the white paper or other types of innovative models could be pilot-tested in various local and regional jurisdictions throughout the U.S. As explained in the paper, there are a number of ways for EMS systems to appropriately care for their patients while maintaining financial sustainability.
The agencies anticipate that the White Paper and Model would be helpful if used by local, regional, state EMS, and health system planners to prepare funding strategies and proposals for innovative collaboration among EMS systems.
To view the draft White Paper, go to www.ems.gov/innovation.htm.