Increased data flow from EMS to hospital saves time, boosts care

Better communication, use of analytics can lead to improve treatment, says Peter Antevy, MD.


Emergency medical services represents the No. 1 referral source for most hospitals, says Peter Antevy, MD, medical director at Davie Fire Rescue and a pediatric emergency department physician at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Fla.

Too often, information between an ambulance and the hospital is exchanged verbally, or if data is being transmitted, it is done in only one direction—EMS personnel are sending patient data to the hospital, with nothing being transmitted back to them.



While that helps emergency personnel at the hospital be better prepared for the patient’s arrival, the hospital may well already have historical data on the patient from the electronic health records system that EMS personnel in the ambulance should know.

To bridge that disconnect on data, Davie Fire Rescue and the hospital are using software from ESO Solutions that enables two-way data exchange.

During a session at HIMSS17, Antevy and Allen Johnson, vice president of health data exchange and analytics at ESO Solutions, and Jeff Jarvis, MD, medical director at Williamson County EMS in Georgetown, Texas, will talk of the benefits. Two-way exchange, Antevy says, can actually change clinician treatment behavior both in the ambulance and at the hospital.

For example, many patients believed to be suffering from a heart attack are not actually having one, but the cath lab is being activated at the hospital for the arriving patient. If the eventual diagnosis is not a heart attack, then the scramble alert in the cath lab was really a waste of resources, Jarvis says.

Compiling data and conducting statistical analyses helped identify false positives in cardiac events. With EMS and the hospital sharing data where the patient is initially being treated and then while enroute, access to enough data can help determine if different treatment is warranted.

That not only changes treatment en route and at the hospital, but also changes training processes for both emergency medical technicians and clinicians at the hospital.

In essence, Antevy says, tighter data collaboration between EMS and hospital personal changes care on a regional level.

Session 189: Driving Improvement by Bridging EMS and Hospital Data, is scheduled at 1 p.m. on February 22 in Room W304A.

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