Hannah Ostrem

On Wednesday, October 24th at 1pm EDT, Kris Kaull, critical care flight paramedic and Pulsara's CMO, will join David Edgar, CCP, paramedic and assistant chief of EMS for the city of West Des Moines, Iowa to discuss how their region has used mobile technology to improve treatment times. EMS World will be hosting the webinar ahead of the EMS World Expo at the end of the month.

According to a recent study published in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions, activating the cath lab for patients with STEMI diagnosis before their arrival at the hospital led to significantly shorter wait times, shorter door-to-device times, and ultimately reduced mortality. 

A review of the study in MedPage Today stated: "Activating the cardiac catheterization laboratory at least 10 minutes before an ST-segment elevation MI (STEMI) patient arrived at the hospital was associated with less reperfusion delay -- and possibly better in-hospital survival, a large registry study showed.

Among patients with a pre-hospital diagnosis of STEMI who were transported by ambulance to a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) center, 41% had the cardiac cath lab activated more than 10 minutes before hospital arrival. Compared to cases with later cath lab activation, these patients were more likely to (P<0.001 for all):

• Be transported directly to the cath lab (23.3% versus 5.3%)
• Spend less time between hospital arrival and cath lab arrival (median 17 versus 28 min)
• Have shorter door-to-device time (40 versus 52 min)
• Achieve first medical contact-to-device times of 90 min or less (76.6% versus 68.6%)

Tomorrow at 8:00am PST, Pulsara's Founder and CEO, Dr. James Woodson, will be speaking at Take Heart America's State of the Future of Resuscitation Conference in Oakland, CA. The goal of the conference is to "discuss ways to combine the best evidence and experience from the innovative work of the participants to optimize the systems-of-care approach to cardiac arrest."

Dr. Woodson will present about the need for regional communication networks, and how they are critical to a systems of care approach to cardiac arrest. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article was produced and published by Becker's Hospital Review. Team Pulsara would like to thank them for their thorough interview of Dr. Woodson and Dr. Atkinson. 

Communication issues in the healthcare industry can be detrimental to patient care, waste time and negatively affect a provider's bottom line. During an August 29 webinar sponsored by Pulsara and hosted by Becker's Hospital Review, James Woodson, MD, founder and CEO of Pulsara, and William Atkinson, PhD, president of Guidon Healthcare Consulting, discussed several communication inefficiencies in healthcare and offered a solution to streamline communication across providers, improve patient outcomes and reduce waste.

It's a fact: poor communication contributes to 80% of medical errors, over 33% of all malpractice suits, poor patient outcomes and redundant costs. 

As a patient transitions through the healthcare system, the hand off between healthcare teams puts them at great risk. To make matters worse, current technology solutions isolate patient care teams in communication silos, further contributing to this breakdown.

How do you connect pre-hospital and inter-facility specialists with your intra-facility teams?

Best practices and new skills are constantly evolving in EMS, and since every second counts in the prehospital environment, medics must prioritize staying current on these developments. 

That's why EMS1 has released an ebook titled "10 Things You Need to Know to Save Lives." The ebook covers four of the most common and critical time-sensitive emergencies medics are likely to encounter: STEMI, stroke, sepsis, and trauma. 

The  next time you’re feeling under the weather on a flight, you might take comfort in knowing that the world’s first airport emergency room opened last week at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

While the airport already has a pharmacy and an urgent care, those facilities are meant more for minor ailments, whereas the new freestanding ER will serve patients with more serious conditions like chest pain.

Why do you need a new way to communicate with your care teams?

Why should you change your hospital or EMS system's processes? You've been doing your job the same way for decades, so why change now? 

We're glad you asked. Let's look at Mississippi for example.

Did you know that Mississippi has the highest rate of ischemic stroke in the country, yet we only treat 15% of LVO stroke patients with approved treatment?

Medical errors in healthcare kill about 400,000 people per year secondary to medical error.

On top of that, you have 10,000 serious medical complications every single day, which affects 1 in 5 Americans.

And, 80% of these medical errors are due to miscommunication.

According to Dr. James Woodson, Founder and CEO of Pulsara, these facts are what drove him to transition from practicing medicine full time to focusing on making the Pulsara platform a reality. 

"A lot of our staff still use pagers," Dr. Woodson said in a new podcast episode hosted by Medic2Medic. "But 50% of all pages go to the wrong person in acute scenarios. That's a massive source of miscommunication that causes complications and delays. And, in many places in the U.S. we don't have systems in place to remedy in real time when those call lists are wrong."

Today is the last day of April, and you know what that means. Tomorrow...

Awesome NSYNC memes aside, May also marks the American Trauma Society's annual National Trauma Awareness Month. Each year, the society assigns a theme to the month, to raise awareness of injury prevention efforts.

Why is innovation in healthcare so slow?  

"Despite their stated enthusiasm, hospitals have been notoriously slow to adopt digital innovations. Explanations include their IT departments already have their hands full installing, maintaining, and upgrading electronic health record (EHR) systems. But much of the blame can be attributed to hospitals’ misaligned budgeting and incentive systems."

A recent article from Harvard Business Review shows how our hospital budget systems are holding back innovation and gives suggestions for how we can address the problems. Specifically, the article mentions three barriers hospitals have to adopting new technology.

I recently heard a story about a STEMI patient that really drove home the magnitude of healthcare's communication problem. In this case, a member of the care team had administered a medication, and in the haste of the emergency, this critical piece of information was missed by other members of the care team. Can you predict what happened next? Yep. Another clinician administered the exact same dose again moment later. Luckily, the error wasn't life threatening, but it easily could have been.

Dr. Christopher Johnson recently authored an article about the Dangerous Game of Telephone in Hospitals.  In the article, he describes his experience as an attending physician where hospital staff tends to adopt a passive voice and third person sentence construction when discussing any decisions doctors, nurses, and other staff members make about a patient's care. 

 EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to our guest blogger, Bob Sullivan. Bob Sullivan, MS, NRP, is a paramedic instructor at Delaware Technical Community College. He has been in EMS since 1999, and has worked as a paramedic in private, fire-based, volunteer, and municipal EMS services, and is an ally to Pulsara. Contact info for Bob can be found on his blog, The EMS Patient Perspective.

 This post originally appeared on EMS1.com. Enjoy!

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EMS use of scales to determine stroke severity can have a significant impact on patient outcomes; here’s how.

Understand the capabilities of specialty teams in your region and how to activate them to save lives.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to our guest blogger, Bob Sullivan. Bob Sullivan, MS, NRP, is a paramedic instructor at Delaware Technical Community College. He has been in EMS since 1999, and has worked as a paramedic in private, fire-based, volunteer, and municipal EMS services, and is an ally to Pulsara. Contact info for Bob can be found on his blog, The EMS Patient Perspective.

 This post originally appeared on EMS1.com. Enjoy!

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This article originally appeared in JEMS.

As a board-certified emergency physician, James Woodson witnessed firsthand how technology has evolved in healthcare. A resource that has become an everyday commodity to industries of all sizes, mobile technology has the potential to transform how EMS services operate and improve patient outcomes in the prehospital setting.

 As communication technologies in healthcare continue to evolve, so does the potential for clinicians to deliver life-saving treatment in record time. These new lower times-to-treatment also consistently produce better patient outcomes after treatment. As such, it is crucial to reduce the time-to-treatment for emergency conditions as much as possible.

In order to evaluate the efficacy of methods for reducing time to treatment, a recent study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine examined the effects of pre-hospital notification of STEMI by EMS teams and method of arrival on door-to-balloon times. 

Communication in healthcare is universally problematic, and it's no secret that clinicians are looking for a better way to communicate ... a way that fits how they communicate in the rest of their lives outside of EMS or the hospital. 

What does your hospital do to support stroke survivors during their recoveries?