Kinsie Clarkson

After streamlining communication for their stroke teams with Pulsara, Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, WA reduced door-to-needle times for tPA patients by 31%.

Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, is a 349-bed hospital serving the Puget Sound region since 1953. The hospital treats more than 245,000 outpatients and 18,000 inpatients each year, and is a Joint Commission-certified Advanced Stroke Center. 

As a thrombectomy-capable facility with a large staff of specialists, nurses, and more, Overlake Medical Center sees ~900 acute stroke cases per year. With this volume, providing time-sensitive care is of the utmost importance to producing positive patient outcomes. Overlake knew they needed a streamlined means of communication to help make existing stroke workflows more efficient. 

“With so many people in the system, unnecessary team members were being alerted for a stroke case, which added extraneous noise as they cared for patients,” said Overlake Medical Center’s Stroke Team leaders .

LewisGale Hospital Montgomery in Blacksburg, Virginia, recently achieved a record door-to-balloon time of 14 minutes for one of their STEMI patients—one of their fastest ever. 

LewisGale has been working to create clearer lines of communication between its team members. They implemented Pulsara to successfully create a streamlined process for team communication around potential heart attack patients. 

Dr. John Patterson, a cardiologist at LewisGale, described how Pulsara allows him to receive notifications and information about a new patient instantly: "With this platform, I have the ability to see the EKG and activate the cath lab. All of this happens immediately so that it shortens the length of time it takes from the time the patient starts having their heart attack to the time they arrive at our hospital, to the time that we fix it. All of these times get shortened significantly with a platform like this." 

In the wake of the global pandemic, hospitals worldwide are struggling to cope with many challenges—chief among them, severe staffing shortages. Two years of pandemic conditions have barraged hospital staff, bringing new and unyielding challenges to the whole care system. Clinicians are facing longer hours, fewer resources, more responsibilities stretched between fewer people, the relentless pressure of pandemic stressors and mitigation measures, lack of support or understanding from the general public, and ultimately higher rates of burnout.

As a result, hospitals are grappling with severe staffing shortages. According to a recent survey by Hospital IQ, 90% of the nurses in their survey sample are considering leaving the nursing profession within the next year, with 71% of nurses with over 15 years of experience considering leaving either immediately or very soon. 

While there will need to be an influx of new nurses to regain balance, not all strategies for coping with the shortage have to do with recruitment. Technology can help make complex and frustrating tasks more simple. And according to the Hospital IQ survey, that might just be the determining factor in whether or not nurses decide to stay in the profession.

By streamlining workflows, technology can save a great deal of time and energy for hospital staff, making cumbersome and stressful processes smooth and efficient. Here's how.

When first encountering a new patient, you have a lot of information to quickly relay to the rest of the care team. Thankfully, you've got the patient's driver's license, so that's one hurdle already overcome. But now comes the challenge of quickly entering all this information and passing it along to the rest of your team. 

But if you're using Pulsara, not to worry: we'd like to share with you a new feature that can make this process easy. Key identification data from a US driver's license can be automatically scanned into the patient channel using Driver's License Scanning. 

What if EMS could “see into the future," having access to critical details about a hospital's ED availability status—such as whether it was at capacity during a mass casualty event or whether its CT scanner was down—before they even reached the hospital? If EMS knew a hospital's ED availability ahead of time, they could quickly reroute their patients to the closest alternative available care, saving precious time for patients and care teams.

Now, they can. 

Introducing Pulsara's newest feature: ED Availability.

With this new feature, healthcare facilities and EMS agencies can now access ED Availability information directly from the platform. Specifically, critical details about a hospital’s capability to accept patients can be easily updated by each facility and will appear to EMS and Ambulance crews when choosing a destination. This means improved decision-making for EMS and faster, more efficient care for patients in their most critical moments. 

When EMS providers start a new patient case in Pulsara and go to select their destination, they'll now not only be able to see the available facilities in their area—they'll also be able to see the hospital's emergency department availability status, updated in real time by the facility. 

ED Availability allows healthcare facilities to post status updates about their Emergency Department's availability directly to the Pulsara platform. Hospitals that enable ED Availability can update their status in a matter of seconds, by switching out their icon and/or adding a brief comment. Read on to learn more!

The COVID-19 pandemic has lengthened response times for ambulance agencies worldwide, making it much more difficult to find placement for patients. A recent report released by Australia’s Ambulance Victoria confirmed that this trend has worsened significantly in the state of Victoria during the last three months of 2021, showing a significant increase in response times across the region.  

The new data from Ambulance Victoria shows that paramedics’ ability to respond to code 1 emergencies within the recommended standard of 15 minutes dropped by 12% over the previous 12 months, going from 79% in October to December of 2020 to 67% during the same period in 2021. This means that around one-third of code 1 emergencies waited more than 15 minutes for responders to arrive. Melbourne’s suburbs have been disproportionately affected by the delays, owing to distance. Towns like Melton and Cardinia averaged around 53%. 

Chaos is woven into the DNA of emergent care. Emergency care professionals face the unknown around every corner—from supporting a low acuity patient to managing a mass casualty event. You never know what you’re going to get. 

Sometimes, you have a day that’s more chaotic than others. Other times, the chaos lasts much longer than a day—it can become a lasting situation that extends into months and even years. Few seasons have been quite as chaotic as the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID has tested and tried our healthcare systems to the breaking point, introducing factors like virus spikes, hospitalization surges, burnout, and staffing shortages. 

To keep growing, keep improving, and keep adapting to the situation, some things will need to change. The problem is, it seems impossible to do anything about the situation while you’re treading water. It can feel like trying to bail out a rowboat as you continue to paddle—trying to do everything all at the same time. But if you can introduce a change that will help either paddle the boat or bail with less effort, the time and energy it takes to implement that change will ultimately help make the job easier for the long term. 

It has been a challenging year in healthcare. The second year of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought burnout, staffing shortages, and the continued struggles associated with trying to care for patients during a pandemic. 

In the midst of it all, many healthcare systems have risen to the challenge and devoted themselves to providing better, faster, and more efficient care for their patients. They've achieved amazing things in 2021, and, in spite of the setbacks and challenges, have found ways to continue to deliver top-notch care for their patients.

Join us as we take a walk through Pulsara's 2021 case studies, celebrate the stories of some of our partner organizations, and highlight the amazing results they've achieved this year!

Ouachita County Medical Center (OCMC) is a not-for-profit hospital with 99 beds, serving residents of the rural community surrounding the city of Camden in southern Arkansas, about 100 miles from Little Rock. As a smaller, non-PCI facility, OCMC often coordinates transfers for their STEMI patients to PCI facilities.

Previously, when a patient arrived in the OCMC emergency room with a STEMI, whether by ambulance or private car, staff would first page a cardiologist at the patient’s preferred receiving facility, then wait for the physician to call back. Only then could they start the process of transferring the patient to a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) facility that could provide critical care. “Then we had to get a bed confirmed, and then we had to wait to get our EMS service to take the patient. And then, usually, most of those patients at that time went to Little Rock, which is about an hour and a half from where we are,” explained Jennifer Ray, RN, OCMC’s ER and ICU manager. “So the timeliness of the patient getting in and out was very, very slow.” How slow? During 2017, the average door-in, door-out (DIDO) time was 72 minutes for the 19 STEMI patients who came into the OCMC ER—more than double the 30 minutes or less recommended by the American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association.

The past two years have done a great deal to redefine the shifting identity of EMS. COVID-19 changed a lot about how we provide care, and some of the solutions we came up with have led to a watershed of self-discovery. With that, though, comes an equal number of questions. What does the shifting landscape of healthcare mean for EMS? What will the role of EMS be going forward? As the identity of EMS evolves and medics are given more agency, will they be able to help find solutions for problems like overcrowded emergency departments, while also giving patients both a better and more appropriate care experience? 

Corey Ricketson, Pulsara's Vice President of Strategic Accounts, recently had the opportunity to discuss these and other hot topics in EMS with Chris Cebollero on The Inside EMS podcast, hosted by EMS1. Corey shares his experiences visiting multiple EMS agencies throughout the country, as well as some top takeaways from how leading EMS agencies are finding solutions to issues like ED overcrowding. Chris and Corey talk community paramedicine, how EMS needs to adapt for the future, the importance of meeting patients where they are, and how interoperability, connection, and communication should be a main focus for EMS agencies.

Listen to the podcast below, and read on for part 2 of the interview! (If you missed part 1, check it out here.)

The past two years have done a great deal to redefine the shifting identity of EMS. COVID-19 changed a lot about how we provide care, and some of the solutions we came up with have led to a watershed of self-discovery. With that, though, comes an equal number of questions. What does the shifting landscape of healthcare mean for EMS? What will the role of EMS be going forward? As the identity of EMS evolves and medics are given more agency, will they be able to help find solutions for problems like overcrowded emergency departments, while also giving patients both a better and more appropriate care experience? 

Corey Ricketson, Pulsara's Vice President of Strategic Accounts, recently had the opportunity to discuss these and other hot topics in EMS with Chris Cebollero on The Inside EMS podcast, hosted by EMS1. Corey shares his experiences visiting multiple EMS agencies throughout the country, as well as some top takeaways from how leading EMS agencies are finding solutions to issues like ED overcrowding. Chris and Corey talk community paramedicine, how EMS needs to adapt for the future, the importance of meeting patients where they are, and how interoperability, connection, and communication should be a main focus for EMS agencies.

Listen to the podcast below, and read on for part 1 of the full interview! 

Baptist Health in Little Rock, Arkansas, is using new technology to reduce treatment times and deliver better patient care. Dr. Wendell Pahls, Medical Director of Emergency and Transfer Services at Baptist Health, spoke to The Vine about how Pulsara is helping them streamline communication and cut down treatment times. 

"It's really cool," said Dr. Pahls. "We've taken a very fundamental concept, which is that the sooner that we can treat you for time-sensitive illnesses—like strokes, heart attacks, and things like that—the sooner we can get you into definitive care, the better off you'll be. Everybody these days carries around one of these: a cell phone," he said. With Pulsara's communication and logistics platform, Baptist Health has been able to link all their different providers together on one patient channel, facilitating better communication around each patient—and, as a result, better, faster patient care. 

Check out the video interview here! 

In April of 2021, New Zealand Health Minister Andrew Little announced plans to abolish the 20 district health boards (DHBs) and replace them instead with a single organization called Health New Zealand, which will be responsible for hospitals across the country. 

The unexpected announcement was a major indicator of changes to come in New Zealand's health system. As the system reforms its organizational and decision-making structure, they are also looking for a solution to a fragmented data system in health IT. 

New Zealand has struggled with a fragmented process for transmitting patient data for many years. Current processes don't allow for the seamless, secure transmission of patient data between facilities.

It has been a rough eighteen months for all disciplines within healthcare. Since the start of the pandemic, call volumes have increased. More people need help. And yet, as the pandemic drags on, there are fewer and fewer providers still on the job. Emergency services agencies around the world are experiencing staffing shortages. Headline after headline after headline has demonstrated that the problem is both severe and widespread.

Many factors have contributed to staffing shortages in EMS across the United States, as well as ambulance services in the UK and Australia. These factors will need to be addressed soon. In the meantime, however, those still on the job are left looking for ways to continue providing care for their patients. Staffing shortages are hard enough but are made even worse for those left behind when the lack of providers starts to impact the level of care they can provide. 

Over the past year, telehealth became a favored tool in non-emergent care for helping clinicians treat patients from a distance. However, many EMS agencies are now discovering that leveraging telehealth as a part of normal practice can actually help save time, preserve resources, and increase the output of smaller crews. 

If you're struggling with staffing shortages, here are a few ways telehealth may be able to help you work with the resources you have. 

As a tertiary care center and Level I trauma facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the trauma team at UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central had their patient care process dialed in. However, there was one part of their process they weren’t satisfied with: their communication system.

The team was receiving notifications through an alarm dispatch system, which ran through the hospital operators and was then manually managed by each individual service line. UCHealth’s Associate Nurse Manager, Nikki Schroeder, BSN, RN, CEN, TCRN, described their process: “Prehospital providers would call in to our ED charge nurse, relay pertinent information, and then the ED charge nurse would determine what level of activation was required. To notify our hospital team, the charge nurse would give the information to our unit clerk, and our unit clerk would page our 811 paging system. That’s how the trauma surgeon, the ICU, and the whole trauma team got notified.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in innumerable ways, but it's growing increasingly apparent that it's contributed to a worldwide crisis of another kind: mental health.

The need for mental health resources in the UK is on a sharp incline. Dr Adrian James, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, recently stated that the pandemic has posed a great threat to mental health, and threatens to undo years of progress without a new injection of funds into the system. 

While mental health has been a growing need for a number of years, the demand has increased exponentially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In June of 2021, a record 1.5 million people across the UK received mental health treatment from the National Health Service (NHS). According to Dr James, many more desperately need that treatment. After a year of lockdowns, an estimated 1.6 million more people have come forward looking for help, and are waiting for treatment.

PART 2 of 2

Editor’s Note — This is Part 2 on the events that took place on September 11, 2001, through the personal account of Chief John Peruggia, retired Chief of FDNY EMS. If you haven’t yet, please read Part 1 — Remembering 9/11 Through the Lens of FDNY’s Chief of EMS.

Planes hit. 

Buildings collapse. 

Lives are lost. 

Loved ones are lost. 

Grief. Fear. Anger. Mourning. 

Tragedies shape everything that comes after them, separating time into two distinct frames: Before, and After. 

The dust settles, and those left behind in its wake are left to pick up the pieces. 

Through the loss, through the darkness, come sparks of innovation. 

PART 1 of 2

Editor’s Note — I recently had the privilege of spending time with Chief John Peruggia, retired Chief of FDNY EMS. He shared his vivid memories of September 11, 2001, and how the world has (and hasn’t) changed over the past 20 years. Chief, thank you for your time and sacrifice to the EMS community.

Where were you on September 11, 2001? Instantly, each of us can vividly remember what we were doing when two planes collided with the World Trade Center. The stories that came from that day continue to echo down through the years, as we approach the 20th anniversary of the event.

But few people quite know the story like those who were there. 

Chief John Peruggia was one of those people. 

When COVID-19 struck Texas in early 2020, Montgomery County Hospital District suddenly faced a whole host of new problems. Patients were still calling 911 and needed emergent care, but not all of them needed—or wanted—to be transported to the hospital. Paramedics were daily putting themselves at risk as they entered environments that could expose them to COVID-19. 

“Early on, we didn't know what was going to happen,” said Rob Dickson, MD, FAAEM, FACEP, FACEM, and EMS Medical Director at MCHD. “And we were all—across the nation, across the world—struggling with procedures and PPE and how we could best look after our employees.”

MCHD had a brief window to come up with innovative solutions. They had been using Pulsara to streamline care team communication around stroke and STEMI patients. But in response to the crisis, they began using Pulsara for a completely different purpose: regularly checking in with their employees who had contracted or had been exposed to COVID-19.