On any given day, healthcare providers interact with many forms of technology. Communication apps, EHRs, ePCRs, patient portals, and digital health trackers are just a few of the types of technology designed to make life easier for clinicians. From fostering better communication to digitizing patient information, mobile technology platforms are intended to help medical professionals in a number of areas.
Unfortunately, despite the best intentions, expectations don't always match reality.
Happy International Nurses Day! Acknowledging the dedication of nurses across the globe seems a fitting way to round out Nurses Week 2021. Through my nearly three decades as a nurse, I cannot recall a time when the recognition of hard work, sacrifice, and commitment nurses exhibit daily has ever been so publicly promoted as it has throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. From media stories on nurses giving up their full-time positions to travel to regions hit hardest with COVID-19 to assist their peers—to the WHO designating 2020 The Year of the Nurse—to community members rallying to celebrate and support hospital staff as they enter and leave their shifts, a greater awareness of the complexities of the nursing profession has emerged.
As stated by ICN President Annette Kennedy, “Politicians understand the cost of educating and maintaining a professional nursing workforce, but only now are many of them recognizing their true value.” While no one enters into nursing for notoriety or recognition, it is well deserved and greatly appreciated.
Imagine:
You arrive on the scene of a single-vehicle MVA with two passengers. The driver is a male in his 80s, and you can see that he requires immediate transport. However, he doesn't seem concerned about himself; instead, he keeps asking about his passenger—his wife, who has died.
What do you tell him?
Ethics is a major consideration in other allied health professions, but the topic rarely receives much attention in EMS. And when it does, most tend to assume that the same ethical considerations that apply to physicians carry over into EMS. That's not always the case. While many of the same principles do apply, their application might look different for medics. Medics often face unique situations where time is short, options are limited, and consent unavailable. And now, in the midst of a pandemic, medics face many situations where tough decisions must be made with limited resources in short order.
A more full discussion of the differences in ethics for EMS may be found here, but there are ten ethical concepts medics need to be familiar with in order to make the best possible decisions while they're in the field.
Here are the top 10 things you need to know about ethics in EMS.
For a long time, traumatic stress and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder have been conditions associated with those that have experienced combat or been in the military. Recently, there has been mounting evidence that first responders are also experiencing these conditions at alarming rates, and that we need to make our own mental health a priority.
For a long time mental health, self-care, and peer-care have been taboo subjects among first responders. Thankfully, that is beginning to change, and discussion of these topics has been encouraged. Knowing more about first responder mental health can help you participate in the conversation, help yourself, and help your peers.
This week, Ontario officials announced a second, more stringent stay-at-home order in an attempt to help mitigate the recent surge of COVID-19 cases in the province.
"According to officials, there is a real threat that the province’s hospital system could collapse under the pressure."
Summer blockbusters may have been cancelled, but this year, we've gotten to see what it truly means to be a superhero.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, doctors, nurses, paramedics, and emergency responders of every kind stepped up to take care of others. They’ve chosen to be there for us in our hour of need, sacrificing their own health, safety, and even the ability to go home to be with their families at the end of long, scary, and difficult shifts. That’s the true definition of heroism.
To celebrate these healthcare heroes, Marvel Comics partnered with Allegheny Health Network (AHN) in Pennsylvania to help tell the stories of these real-life heroes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Bet Martin for writing today's blog post. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
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#ItsAboutPeople
We unite and empower people to improve health by simplifying care coordination.
Said another way...
The Pulsara Team places control back into the hands of clinicians and patients to create better outcomes.
Healthcare is complex. We make it simpler.
But more than that, we care about people. Our value of Servant Leadership means that we love people. We passionately serve people and the people who serve people. Our success is measured by the success of those we serve.
To begin to understand the rates at which minorities are disproportionately disadvantaged in the healthcare system, we as caregivers need to examine our implicit ethnic bias. Implicit social cognition, AKA implicit bias, is taking stereotypes (cultural conditioning) and applying them to our everyday thoughts, actions, activities, and practices.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Scott Stanley for writing today's blog post. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
The holidays are upon us. All is calm; all is bright. But not in your local Emergency Room. Or at your community’s fire station. For providers of healthcare and EMS services, the holidays can feel even more stressful than any other time in their busy work lives. In addition to the usual stress they encounter as part of their job descriptions, they are burdened with being away from family and loved ones, making their shifts even harder.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 11, 2019
PRESS CONTACT
Hannah Ostrem
Hannah.Ostrem@pulsara.com
(877) 903-5642
Bozeman, Mont. — Pulsara is excited to announce that the company has been selected as a Finalist by a 4-person judging panel for the 2019 EMS World Expo Innovation Award.
Pulsara connects care teams across organizations and their latest innovative feature to be nominated for the award is their new EMS handoff feature. Whereas EMS providers have historically had workflows to hand off patients to hospital teams in Pulsara, First Responders now have the ability to start a case and hand off the patient to an EMS crew.
When I was fresh out of Paramedic school, STEMI and stroke patients were something we couldn’t do much about except monitor and transport. To be honest, we hadn’t even started using the term "STEMI," and we were years away from giving aspirin. Patients who survived to get discharged out of the CCU or ICU (there were no stroke units then) went on to rehab or an extended care facility with a shoebox full of meds. They were armed with lots of Digitalis and Lasix, but not much hope.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Alyana Samai is the Director of Stroke Services at West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, Louisiana. Aly has been a champion user of Pulsara since 2016, and has led her teams to successfully decrease door to needle times by streamlining and improving communication when it matters most.
Dear Aly,
We are new clients and implementing Pulsara at our facility, but many of our nurses are concerned that this is going to be "double documentation," more than communication. How can we help them understand that Pulsara can streamline the process, reduce communication frustrations, and not double up on tasks?
Sincerely,
Prepared for Pulsara
BACKGROUND
Virginia Mason Medical Center is a nonprofit health care system based in King County, Seattle, serving the central Puget Sound region and Yakima area.
PROBLEM
Focused on continually delivering the highest quality of care to patients, care teams at Virginia Mason Medical Center wanted to innovate the way they communicated with one another to better respond to time-sensitive stroke cases.
Simply being able to get the right message to the right care team members in the right amount of time can be an incredibly convoluted process in today's healthcare world. Worse, the lack of a reliable system of communication causes hundreds of thousands of medical errors every year.
As healthcare professionals, we have a powerful opportunity to change things for the better. To improve the lives of patients and the healthcare system as a whole - by demanding better processes and changes to protocols that simply don't work. And, to improve quality in healthcare delivery.
Healthcare is burdened by the archaic means of communication. And everyone — from EMS to critical care teams to the discharge teams at the hospital — is feeling the effects. Luckily, hospital and EMS providers no longer need to be stuck in the dark ages of communication. Technology companies like Pulsara and Acuity Link work to streamline the most frustrating and broken parts of the patient care and communication processes from first medical transport through patient discharge.
Acuity Link’s CEO and co-founder, Alex Theoharidis purpose-built the company as a means to address mounting inefficiencies in the medical transportation request process. Today he shares his perspectives around what is needed to streamline non-emergency medical transport (NEMT) logistics in order to improve patient flow, and how solutions like Acuity Link work to elevate a customer’s patient transfer process – and ultimately the entire patient experience.
Pulsara's Chief Marketing Officer, Kris Kaull, was recently on the Med Inspired podcast where he discussed his long career in paramedicine, today's culture in EMS and how it affects the success of medics, and what advice he has for new clinicians.
In the episode, Kris stressed the impact mentors in EMS can have -- both good and bad. Good mentors, he said, can make all the difference in a young medic's success. And, fittingly for Mental Health Awareness Month, Kris urged mentors to realize the potential they have to help other clinicians who may be struggling with the weight the industry can place on the psyche. Be aware of opportunities to help fellow medics, whether clinically or personally. "It's about paying it forward and encouraging people who are trying to build something," he said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Scott Stanley for writing today's blog post. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
The secret to effective communication is knowing how and when to share your message. This is something that, after 20 years of marriage, I am finally starting to grasp the concept of.
Let me explain: When we communicate with others, we can do so in two ways -- in real-time (synchronously), or we can deliver a message that can be consumed by the recipient when it is convenient for them, (asynchronously).
For instance, I have found that when communicating with my wife about an injury to one of my children, a phone call, no matter what time of day or night, is warranted. Information is shared between us that is used to make decisions in the care and treatment of those injuries, and an action plan is set in place quickly. This real-time, synchronous communication lets us be as efficient as possible under time-sensitive conditions.
“Every nine minutes a person in Australia suffers from a new or recurrent stroke. The growing burden of stroke care around the globe highlights the need for advances in treatment, particularly rapid identification of symptoms and quick delivery of definitive care.”
EMS World recently published an article describing how “Australia is employing new technology to improve stroke coordination and care.” We're honored to say that this new technology is Pulsara!
The article describes how there are limitations to linear care and how this can cause unwanted delays specifically with communication and moving the patient from one area of care to the next. With stroke care, this is not an isolated problem that only affects the US, but is recognized throughout the world.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Jeff Jensen for writing today's blog post. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
Recently, NAEMSP published a study on the importance of the quality of EMS communication handoff during pediatric resuscitations. As quoted in the study, they state “The Joint Commission has identified ineffective handoff communication as a contributing factor in 80% of serious medical errors. The quality of handoff communication from EMS to ED teams for critically ill pediatric patients needs further exploration.”
