For Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) near Melbourne, Australia, streamlining communication has been a major area of focus, both to improve patient care and to strengthen collaboration across its healthcare system. Up until the beginning of 2020, they used a combination of phone calls and pagers to interface among Emergency Services, ED, and hospital staff—resulting in inefficiencies and challenging communication for caregivers.

A contest.

An adoring niece.

And, a humble EMT.

Put them together, and you get one beautiful story.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged into June, essential workers continued to put their lives on the line each day to take care of others. The American Girl Company wanted to highlight their service. A request went out asking for nominations of friends or family members who were putting their own health at risk to step up to serve others in the midst of the pandemic, calling it the Heroes with Heart contest. At the end of August, American Girl announced the five grand prize winners. 

Among those five winners was April O’Quinn, an EMT for Richmond Ambulance Authority.

Every year, millions of people around the world die from sepsis. The CDC estimates that at least 1.7 million adults in America develop sepsis every year, and that 1 in 3 people who die in hospitals have sepsis.

With state-of-the-art facilities and well-trained caregivers, St. Bernards’ cardiac teams were already achieving door-to-balloon (DTB) times well within the recommended guidelines for STEMI response. But that didn’t stop them from looking for ways to get even better.

“We have a lean process for STEMI response, but we needed a way to see the bigger picture for identifying areas we could improve,” said Lindsey Stacy, the hospital’s STEMI coordinator.

Every second counts in the prehospital environment. As we learn more about better ways to provide care, it’s important for EMS providers to stay informed about the latest skills and strategies for saving lives. Last week, EMS1 published an eBook compilation of articles that each detail ten things you need to know to saves lives.

In this free eBook, you’ll find four articles that each contain a list of ten things you need to know about a major care topic. Three cover different critical-care scenarios you’re likely to face in the field (cardiac arrest, major blood loss, and acute pain), and the fourth discusses best practices for handling patient handovers.

Canadian Privacy Researcher Discovers Pagers Broadcasting Sensitive Patient Information on Unencrypted Channels

Healthcare has long relied on pagers as the most secure, reliable way to communicate between clinicians. But new evidence suggests that this time-tested communication method may actually be causing HIPAA violations for unwitting hospitals.

Outdated technology is one of the major factors lurking behind miscommunication in healthcare. Pagers, fax machines, and radios still dominate care spaces, and are the primary method for transmitting important information from person to person. In every other sphere of life, mobile technology has long since replaced these outdated forms of communication—except in healthcare, where every second matters to each patient’s outcome.

Now, the UK's National Health Service has decided to change that. 

Earlier this year, the NHS announced that they will require NHS trusts to replace pagers in UK hospitals by the end of 2021. “Every day, our wonderful NHS staff work incredibly hard in what can be challenging and high-pressured environments. The last thing they need are the frustrations of having to deal with outdated technology – they deserve the very best equipment to help them do their jobs,” said Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock.

As EMS agencies all over the country have struggled to handle COVID-19, many are searching for answers. How do we prepare for possible future waves of COVID-19? Outdated technology cannot keep up with the variety of new challenges. Is there a way to streamline communication and use mobile technology to solve problems and still deliver high-quality patient care? Could such a solution be flexible and scalable, able to handle any situation—even a pandemic?

When COVID-19 hit, Austin-Travis County EMS, serving the Austin, Texas area, had the tools at their disposal to build an efficient system to help mitigate the crisis. They embraced mobile technology in an effort to improve communication, minimize the risk of exposure to healthcare providers, and continue to provide patients with the smartest and most effective quality of care.

There’s one thing in EMS that we don’t often talk about but can all relate to: making stupid decisions.

What causes us to do stupid things, and what can we do to avoid those risks? Pulsara’s CMO Kris Kaull recently made a remote guest appearance on The MCHD Paramedic Podcast to talk with Dr. Casey Patrick, Assistant Medical Director for the Montgomery County Hospital District EMS service, about what we can do to better handle the situations that put us at the greatest peril of making mistakes. Read on for the highlights of the discussion, or listen to the full recording below.

As the summer progresses, more and more cities are experiencing a spike in their numbers of COVID-19 cases. The second wave of the coronavirus is closing in, which means that the remainder of this summer is vital. Now is the time to prepare for the challenges of the months ahead.

A new telehealth solution is an excellent way to plan ahead. Telehealth can greatly expand patient access to essential health services, ensuring that providers can continue to give them high quality care from a distance. Recently, the CDC came out with an article explaining how a secure telehealth solution can set a medical practice up for the best possible results in mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

With the sudden influx of telehealth communication platforms rising to meet needs during COVID-19, barriers to telemedicine have been breaking with record speed. Unfortunately, with the increased use of technology comes increased security risks—risks that leave patient information vulnerable to hackers. 

Since COVID-19, phishing attempts and successes have increased significantly. In mid-April, Google saw more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19. The pandemic has changed our relationship with technology and how we operate on a day-to-day basis. Now, fewer people are suspicious about receiving a text that appears to come from a government agency or a trusted healthcare provider. And even in legitimate technological encounters between providers and patients, unsecured information can fall into the wrong hands and give scammers the opportunity to make their phishing messages look more believable. 

In late May, Dr. James Woodson, the founder and CEO of Pulsara, sat down with Brian Zimmerman of the Becker’s Healthcare podcast series to discuss how telehealth can improve patient care and protect clinicians during COVID-19 and beyond. During the podcast, Dr. Woodson explains the potential of mobile technology in healthcare communication, how Pulsara streamlines the communication process, and Pulsara's role in the future of telemedicine. Listen to the podcast here, or read the interview below. 

EMS.gov recently published a list of best practices for medics to implement during periods of heightened community tension. Since the services offered by EMS are often needed during situations of civil unrest or social upheaval, it's crucial that medics are equipped with plans and protocols specific to these scenarios ahead of time, in efforts to reduce their risk of personal harm.

The list includes practical suggestions for EMS personnel, stations, apparatus, and communication with the community. The guide also covers recommendations to keep in mind for operations, covering topics like coordinating response activities, modifying operations based on perceived threat or risk, maintaining situational awareness, and recommendations for responding to tense situations during COVID-19.

Recommendations for EMS personnel are as follows:

On May 26th, NAEMT hosted a webinar roundtable discussion featuring three distinguished medical directors to discuss how their organizations have been handling triage and transportation decisions during COVID-19, what processes they’ve put in place, and how they hope to continue these practices in the future. Watch the full webinar below, or continue reading for our top seven highlights.

Longview Regional Medical Center (LRMC) has long had a well-designed and fully functioning process for identifying and rapidly treating STEMI patients. The hospital was meeting its goal of keeping door-to-reperfusion times under 60 minutes; as a result, patient outcomes were generally very good. Despite their satisfactory performance, the teams at LRMC believed they could reduce their treatment times even further to improve patient outcomes.

In 2017, a group of doctors and scientists conducted a survey study with paramedics to find out their thoughts on the future of EMS. More specifically, they were interested in finding out what paramedics thought about the possibility of using telemedicine in the back of the ambulance. Would video communication technology be able to help paramedics deliver higher quality care for their patients? Or would it be a time-consuming hindrance?

At the time, using video communication for pre- and out-of-hospital care was still considered a novel idea. Many paramedics expressed that the concept was a new one to them, which possibly accounted for the large number of neutral responses. There were also a number of potential problems with telehealth services that concerned them, including background noise, connection errors, interference with patient care, difficulty in set-up and use, equipment damage, and poor video quality.

This week, The Tech Tribune released an exclusive Q&A with Pulsara's Founder and CEO, Dr. James Woodson. Pulsara has been featured in The Tech Tribune's 2018 Best Tech Startups in Montana, 2019 Best Tech Startups in Bozeman, 2019 Best Tech Startups in Montana, 2020 Best Tech Startups in Bozeman, and 2020 Best Tech Startups in Montana. Check out the full interview here. 

As EMS agencies all over the country have struggled to handle COVID-19, many are searching for answers. How do we prepare for possible future waves of COVID-19? Outdated technology cannot keep up with the variety of new challenges. Is there a way to streamline communication and use mobile technology to solve problems and still deliver high-quality patient care? Could such a solution be flexible and scalable, able to handle any situation—even a pandemic? 

When COVID-19 hit, UCHealth Memorial Central and the Colorado Springs Fire Department were more ready than they anticipated. They had already put in place a communication solution that would enable them to better manage and mitigate the crisis. Though the pandemic brought unprecedented challenges, Colorado Springs used Pulsara to remedy many of the communication issues created by COVID-19. They were able to provide faster, safer patient care by improving care team communication and collaboration across organizations. This is their story.

During the 2019 EMS World Expo last year, Pulsara CMO Kris Kaull sat down with Mike Verkest, EMS Training Officer and Host of "Tales and Stories from EMS World," to talk about success, failure, and his experience working in EMS. In celebration of EMS Week, we're sharing our highlights from that interview. (To watch the full interview, check out the video below).

EMS has traditionally been built around well-established response, treat, and transport protocols. The COVID-19 crisis upended this, expanding the focus beyond time-sensitive emergencies to things like mitigating the demand on local healthcare systems and securing communication for outpatients in medical isolation. These new requirements revealed a deep need for better mobile-first technologies that would enable dynamic communication between the EMS prehospital care teams and all the other hospital clinicians connected to the patient journey. As EMS agencies look for ways to better support patients, telehealth technologies are quickly becoming an indispensable part of their care systems.

In April of 2019, long before COVID-19, the Journal of Emergency Medical Services published a study that followed the success of the Houston Fire Department in using telehealth to provide patients with out-of-hospital care, effectively decreasing costs and hassle for patients who didn’t need transport. They concluded that “given the increase in costs associated with prehospital emergency care, and the increasing burden on these resources from continuous increased calls to 9-1-1, it’s imperative to redesign the traditional delivery system.” And further, they added: “We propose a model where more EMS agencies pursue adoption of telehealth on a pilot basis to determine their role for both acute and non-acute care.”