Pulsara Blog

You chose this career.

Why?

Why did you go into public safety? Why did you go into healthcare? Why did you choose your specialty?

There are a number of possible reasons: Money. Prestige. Honor. Love. Fear. Anger. Hope. Adrenaline. Desire. Pressure. People.

Many of us in public safety and healthcare are just wired differently — especially those of us who deal with time sensitive emergencies. Imagine a group of people witnessing an emergency - a house fire, a car crash, a mass casualty event, a cardiac arrest, a sudden collapse, a STEMI, a stroke. If you were to watch their responses, you would see three types of people:

1. Those who run towards the mayhem.
2. Those who run away.
3. Those who stand still and watch.

Is your job in healthcare to focus on and serve only the patient or is it also to serve others on the TEAM who are caring for the patient?

Patient centric healthcare as we currently practice it is a failed philosophy. We focus on serving the patient for a finite moment in time even though the patient's journey extends well beyond our specific tasks.

In this mindset, we have a system where we — yes, you and I — cause 400,000 deaths per year and 10,000 serious medical complications every day, costing the U.S. an estimated one trillion dollars a year. Additionally, 80% of these errors occur secondary to miscommunication during transitions of care.

Patient centric healthcare is not enough.  We need to realize that just serving the patient is not enough — we ALSO need to serve the fellow clinicians who are serving the patient. We need patient- and people-centric healthcare.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center is the first hospital on the west coast to use the healthcare communication platform, Pulsara, and the first in the nation to use the company's Prehospital Alerting Package.

BOZEMAN, MT -- SEPTEMBER 12, 2017 -- Stroke is a leading cause of disability and death in the U.S., with close to 800,000 cases each year. The outcome can be devastating, and every delay in care impacts a stroke survivor’s chance at a full recovery. To minimize those delays and make emergency communication more efficient, PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, has partnered with several local EMS services to begin using the healthcare communication platform, Pulsara.

PeaceHealth Southwest is the first hospital on the west coast to use Pulsara for STEMI and stroke communications both with EMS and within the hospital, and the first in the nation to use the company's Prehospital Alerting Package for all EMS-transferred patients.

Pulsara was featured in a news clip and article from Fox 45, a local Miami news station, as a service that could "change the game for stroke treatment." The article pointed out that during medical emergencies, every second matters -- particularly when it comes to stroke. "Time is tissue; brain tissue, that is," stated the authors.

Healthcare systems must continue to adopt mobile-friendly platforms to meet users' expectations and offer high-quality care.

Many industries have overhauled their businesses to meet consumers’ expectations of using their mobile devices to do everything from checking in for a flight to ordering takeout food. The healthcare industry has been slower to adopt mobile-friendly platforms, but it is increasingly doing so to meet patients’ and health professionals’ needs. But simply taking current methods of communication and putting them on smartphones is not sufficient — platforms must capitalize on the many advantages mobile technology offers in order to truly transform and improve healthcare.

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

Physician collaboration is associated with fewer patient deaths, readmissions, and emergency room visits.

A study of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) found that when physicians collaborated more, patients had a 24 percent lower rate of emergency room visits and hospital readmissions, and a 28 percent lower rate of death.[10]

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

Physician groups that worked more closely together in caring for patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures were able to produce better patient outcomes, according to recent research.[11] The study examined claims data for 251,630 patients who underwent CABG between 2008 and 2011; the patients received care from 466,243 physicians across more than a thousand health systems. At 60 days post-procedure, patients treated by physician teams with higher levels of cooperation had:

Research suggests that medical errors play an even bigger role in preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals than previously estimated, and 80 percent of all serious medical errors involve miscommunication. That amounts to 250,000 - 400,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Tools that help medical professionals communicate more quickly, accurately, and collaboratively are critical to saving lives. 

More than fifteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on the incidence of medical errors in U.S. hospitals. The report suggested as many as 98,000 people die every year from medical errors.[1] Recent analysis from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says that report may have significantly underestimated the problem, putting the actual number closer to 250,000 - 400,000.[2] In fact, medical error is now considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

As an emergency room physician, I experience firsthand the impact of outdated communication systems — how they hamper good patient care and challenge even the most talented, dedicated, and well-trained medical professionals. In emergency situations, when seconds count, fast and accurate communication between care teams can mean the difference between life and death.

Pulsara was featured last week in a news article on Australian news site, The Courier after Ballarat Base Hospital, Pulsara's second international hospital client, began a pilot of the platform. Ballarat will leverage Pulsara to receive real-time information about a patient’s condition from local paramedics to get the entire emergency department, cardiac, neurology and other specialists and departments on the same page.

“I think it will help you as a doctor to know you’re doing a treatment not only for 3 months, but that the treatment benefit is going to last for at least 2 years,” said Yvo Roos, MD. “It’s going to help you be more convincing to the relatives that you’re doing the right thing, that you’re doing something that’s really going to help them."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

St. Elizabeth Healthcare, in Edgewood, Kentucky, decreased the time to treat critical heart attack patients by 30 percent.

Edgewood, KY – Mar. 30, 2017 – In the past year, St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Edgewood, Kentucky, significantly decreased the time-to-treatment for heart attack patients, following an effort by stakeholders from every part of the care team to collaborate and improve processes that speed up care. This improvement was due also in part to the use of a mobile app, Pulsara, which puts timely, clear information in the hands of everyone responsible for caring for the patient, both inside and outside of the hospital.

For patients who arrived at St. Elizabeth Edgewood via ambulance, the average time from first medical contact (FMC) — defined as the moment emergency medical services (EMS) first arrives at the patient’s side — to the administration of artery-opening treatment in the hospital dropped 30 percent, from 103 minutes in the first quarter of 2016 to 72 minutes in January 2017. The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends aiming for a time-to-treatment of less than 90 minutes because it has been associated with better outcomes for heart attack patients.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

[Bozeman, MT] — Mar. 14, 2017 —Duke University School of Medicine researchers found that patients with stroke received faster treatment when emergency medical services (EMS) activated the stroke team from the field than patients who presented by other methods of arrival.

The researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of 12 major medical centers that used Pulsara’s Stop Stroke, a mobile application that allows EMS transporting a stroke patient to notify emergency department staff and stroke specialists with the tap of a button on a smart phone. Using data from March 2013 to May 2016, they found cases activated by EMS in the field resulted in significant reductions in door-to-CT scan and door-to-needle times as well as an increased likelihood of meeting door-to-needle goal when compared to cases activated in the emergency department.

Editor's Note: The following excerpt originally appeared on the Healthcare Informatics website on March 7, 2017, and the article can be read in its entirety here. Pulsara is humbled by the incredible care teams in Colorado Springs who are tirelessly working and innovating to provide the best possible care for their community. A vision without action is worth very little. It is the hard work and dedication of these teams that is truly making the difference in acute care and in the lives of patients.

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Hospital physicians and nurses know all too well that time can make a difference when treating patients suffering from a heart attack or stroke. Unfortunately, gaps in communication between emergency responders and hospital staff is a persistent and common problem and can slow down the process of getting accurate, pertinent patient information from the field, such as the emergency medical technicians and paramedics on the scene, to the hospital staff.

To tackle these challenges, hospitals from two different health systems have partnered with each other and with a dozen local emergency medical services (EMS) agencies to use mobile technology to coordinate their care teams to accelerate time to treatment for critical care patients and to provide better care for stroke and heart attack patients.

Why do we do what we do?

At Pulsara, our "WHY" is to empower TEAMS of caregivers to come together and achieve the best possible outcomes for critical patients as quickly as possible, and with reduced miscommunications and errors.

As clinicians, our "WHY" is to make a difference in the lives of all the patients and their families we touch.

For Pulsara staff and clinicians alike, our "WHY" is also to influence change where change is gravely needed. To move the needle and find new, better ways of treating patients.

One team has truly embraced this mission. The health system in Victoria, Australia, including the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, recently revealed an incredible telemedicine success story:

This past week at the International Stroke Conference in Houston, Mission: Lifeline Stroke released two documents related to prehospital LVO care.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Scott Stanley for writing today's blog post. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. 

... No, it's not chocolates and flowers.

The medical research community is continually providing us with exciting new technology and clinical findings that can make our jobs in EMS easier and our treatments more precise. So why are we not always sharing these findings with our patients? Well I’m here to tell you, those 80’s parachute pants were great 35 years ago but it’s time to buy some new britches.