Stronger Together: How One Colorado Springs Hospital Is Uniting Regional Emergency Care

UCHealth Memorial Hospital is Using Pulsara to Facilitate Feedback, Education, and Better Outcomes Across Organizations

What if the future of emergency care wasn’t just faster—but more united?

Imagine a collaborative, patient-first mindset that not only bridges the gap between EMS and hospitals, but also brings together hospitals that typically compete.

Many would call that an impossible feat. But not Colorado Springs. 

UCHealth Memorial Hospital is an award-winning 413-bed regional facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As a Level I Trauma Center, Comprehensive Stroke Center, and an ACC Chest Pain Accredited hospital, UCHealth Memorial is relied on to provide high-quality and efficient emergency care to the Colorado Springs community. UCHealth uses Pulsara to receive all EMS notifications, especially for time-sensitive emergencies such as STEMI and stroke. 

Cardiovascular Coordinator Lisa Meyers emphasizes Pulsara's role in facilitating seamless external communication, stating that it’s “a great way for EMS to talk to us.” This direct communication has significantly reduced STEMI treatment times, reduced false activations, and strengthened trust with EMS partners.

Like many hospitals, UCHealth initially adopted the Pulsara platform to streamline EMS-to-ED communication. But they soon discovered it could do far more: help them reduce treatment times, close feedback loops, and create a culture of transparency and trust across the entire emergency care continuum.

Streamlining STEMI Treatment

UCHealth originally set out with the goal of streamlining STEMI care, and they started by adopting Pulsara to foster better communication between EMS and hospital teams. According to Meyers, UCHealth uses Pulsara to communicate because “It’s easier. It's an app [that’s] right there. It's not 15 phone calls to 20 different people.” Pulsara makes it easy for team members to see the patient’s details and coordinate care, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. 

Using Pulsara to improve communication around STEMI patients has helped UCHealth achieve door-to-balloon (DTB) times below 30 minutes. This has a massive impact on both the well-being of the patient and the cost of their care. “When we get them out of that cath lab within that 30-minute door-to-balloon time, we've done less damage to that heart, so their EF (ejection fraction) isn't going to take that hit as hard,” said Meyers. “So now we're not having to deal with brand new heart failure symptoms.” Improved health outcomes lead to shorter stays in the hospital, faster recovery, and reduced cost to both the patient and the hospital.  

Transparency and False Activations 

When EMS identifies a cardiac event like left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) as a STEMI, the alert and ECG are sent directly to cardiology. This leads to on-call specialists being woken up in the middle of the night by STEMI alerts only to look at the ECG, recognize the LVH, and cancel the alert. False activations are a significant stressor for hospital staff, increasing burnout and team member turnover. 

Before implementing Pulsara, these false activations would be filtered and cancelled by the ED, making it hard to measure cancellation rates accurately. “We knew we had a lot of cancellation calls, but I had no way to prove it,” Meyers said. 

When a STEMI alert is canceled by the hospital, EMS is often left in the dark without explanation. These cancellations aren’t always due to errors or false activations, but without context or education, they can lead to confusion and strained relationships. Without open communication between EMS and hospital staff, false activations and alert cancellations are stressful experiences for both organizations. 

Once UCHealth switched to Pulsara, however, the platform revealed a STEMI cancellation rate of over 60% to Meyers and her colleagues. This demonstrated not only that false activations were happening often, but EMS weren’t being given enough information to improve their alert accuracy. Pulsara provided the data UCHealth needed to identify trends, track cancellations, and start meaningful conversations with EMS teams.

Real-Time Communication and Feedback

In order to build trust with EMS partners and reduce alert cancellations, Meyers is leveraging Pulsara’s two-way communication to improve feedback from UCHealth cardiologists to EMS teams. “I'm encouraging my doctors to write back why they cancel[ed] an alert and let EMS know it,” Meyers said. “We've been trying to encourage our doctors to be more proactive about saying, ‘hey, this looks like LVH, but let's evaluate them in the ED anyway.’ So it's a nice tool for education as well.”

Giving EMS an explanation for cancellations—whether it’s due to a misinterpreted ECG or based on factors concerning the patient's health, history, etc.—enables them to recognize the signs of a STEMI more accurately in the future. This also builds stronger relationships between hospitals and EMS, where staff from both organizations are communicating and collaborating for the benefit of the patient. In addition to cancellation feedback, when EMS are given downstream updates on their emergency patients, it helps all parties feel like integral members of the care team.

A Community Effort

But improving care for their own patients was only the first step. In an effort to improve STEMI care across their region, UCHealth Memorial Hospital is using Pulsara to access data that they can use to educate on a larger scale: across organizations.  

Every month, UCHealth also joins local EMS and the other major Colorado Springs hospital system for a joint QA/QI meeting. These organizations work together to share data and procedures in order to improve the quality of care they collectively give the community. Meyers takes the opportunity to advocate for building bridges of communication and feedback between hospitals and EMS, encouraging interventional cardiologists to send explanations when they cancel STEMI alerts. Using Pulsara’s cancellation reports, Meyers can illustrate to other health systems what is actually happening between EMS and hospitals. 

"That's what I love about this,” said Meyers. “I now have the pictures of all the canceled calls. So when I do my big EMS QA meeting once a month, I put those pictures up there for all of their medical directors and educators—and it's funny because sometimes they're like ‘they called a STEMI on that?’

The discussion opened up an opportunity to come up with ideas to improve. Visibility into what’s really happening in cases allows them to continue education with both EMS and hospital staff for continued improvement. An interventional cardiologist from UCHealth teaches a monthly ECG reading class for paramedics that goes over STEMI and other recognizable cardiac events. Meyers said, “What we’re doing is looking at the pictures that are in Pulsara and we're evaluating why this was called, and then we explain: ‘Okay, this was called for LVH. Let us explain to you what LVH is.’” 

The ability to have visibility into each case was crucial to understanding what needed additional education. “That's when we started seeing our call cancellation volume go down,” said Meyers. “We would never honestly have been able to do that without Pulsara.” 

The Transforming Power of Collaboration

The level of cooperation and collaboration among competing facilities in Colorado Springs is remarkable—nearly unheard of. Meyers calls it “a team environment for the whole city, where all of EMS and two hospitals that are rivals and competitors meet once a month to review all the cases and review everything that's going on. We make sure that we're all on the same page with protocols, guidelines, and everything else. We have this really good collaborative relationship that we have taken out to the community, and it has made it a lot better.”

By improving treatment times, strengthening communication with EMS, and gaining collective awareness around patient cases, UCHealth Memorial Hospital is leveraging Pulsara to an impressive extent. What’s much more impressive, however, is the dedication of Meyers’ team and all of the other healthcare workers in the Colorado Springs region who collaborate openly for the benefit of their patients.