Leaders in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) field have long recognized that EMS serve as a vital link in a coordinated healthcare system focused on population health management. EMS has the potential to identify and modify risk, assess and facilitate treatment of chronic conditions, and improve coordination for acute complaints.
Novel rural and urban EMS programs including the one at the Mount Sinai Health System www.mountsinai.org in New York City have begun to fill the gaps in the healthcare system. Now terms such as Community Paramedicine and mobile integrated healthcare are used to describe how the full clinical, operational, and financial capacity of EMS can be harnessed.
To meet the needs of the EMS community, the University of California San Diego Health System http://health.ucsd.edu along with Mount Sinai have received $225,000 over two years to launch a new project titled “Promoting Innovations in EMS” supported by HHS www.hhs.gov, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration www.nhtsa.gov, and the Department of Homeland Security www.dhs.gov.
As EMS agencies strive to innovate within the current infrastructure, they face challenges from existing laws, concerning regulations, financial matters, and technological issues, plus other barriers. The new project will address how to better disseminate and implement innovative EMS delivery models and also create a “National Framework Document” to provide guidance on how to foster new models of healthcare delivery within EMS.
Specifically, the project will:
- Collect input from EMS and community healthcare stakeholders
- Hold regional stakeholder meetings in San Diego and New York in May 2015 to discuss overcoming local barriers to EMS innovation
- Hold a national steering committee in Washington D.C in September 2015
- Draft materials and solicit feedback via the telephone and online from stakeholder groups
According to James Dunford, MD., Professor Emeritus of UC San Diego Health System and EMS Medical Director for the City of San Diego, “This is an opportunity for EMS to merge imagination, sound medicine, and health information technology to improve healthcare. Tomorrow’s innovations will improve domestic preparedness, increase patient access to care, decrease healthcare costs, and improve community resilience.”