EDITOR'S NOTE: The following content originally appeared on EMS1.com. Special thanks to our guest author, Tim Nowak for EMS1 BrandFocus. Tim is the founder and CEO of Emergency Medical Solutions LLC, an independent EMS training and consulting company that he developed in 2010. He's been involved in EMS and emergency services since 2002 and has worked as an EMT, paramedic and critical care paramedic in a variety of urban, suburban, rural and hospital settings. He’s also been involved as an EMS educator, consultant, item writer, clinical preceptor, board member, reference product developer, firefighter and hazmat technician throughout his career.

When the concept for EMS was born nearly 50 years ago, it was meant to be an integrated part of a smooth system of care beginning with the call to EMS dispatch and continuing through to definitive treatment. However, EMS-to-hospital communications have faced significant barriers including miscommunications due to archaic and unreliable technologies, issues transmitting ECGs and other patient data, inadequate training in STEMI recognition, and lack of access to patient outcome information for EMS. According to an article published in JEMS this week, recent studies have shown that prehospital notification by EMS improves time to treatment for stroke, however these notifications are not part of a consistent and standardized protocol, and in 25% of cases, EMS fails to alert the hospital of an incoming stroke patient.

When it comes to communication in healthcare, do you ever feel like you're playing a game of "telephone?"

One of the most challenging aspects of living in the technological age is the speed of change. There was once a day when the person armed with the most knowledge and information had the upper hand. That's not the case in today's world. Instead, the person or company that can rapidly learn and adjust to changing trends, information, and technology will now lead the pack. Your ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be the one skill that separates you from your competition.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following content originally appeared on EMS1.com as paid content sponsored by Pulsara. Special thanks to our guest blogger, Drew Rinella for EMS1 BrandFocus.

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Lactate may be used to identify a common killer in the prehospital environment.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), one million cases of sepsis occur in the US each year, with 258,000 Americans succumbing annually to this life-threatening systemic inflammatory response to infection. Early recognition is crucial to the recovery of the sepsis patient, and lactate plays an important role in the diagnosis of this killer. Here are ten things you need to know about using lactate to identify sepsis:

Just for grins and giggles, I signed in to Netflix recently and watched a few episodes of the medical drama from the 70's, "Emergency!" I'm a little young to remember the show when it was on the air, but when I started in EMS, my paramedic partner insisted that I watch some of it. It was a rite of passage. Of course, there was also Bringing Out the Dead starring Nicholas Cage and Mother, Jugs & Speed with Bill Cosby, but those are for another post.

Geographic Information System (GIS) software has long been employed by public health agencies to assess the health of populations in various locations. But now, healthcare providers are starting to turn to GIS too, in efforts to better identify health risk based on location; as a recent article on the subject points out, there is a strong relationship between people's health and the particular communities they live in.