(Q4/23) ESO Updates: Quarterly Product Enhancements

Happy New Year! As 2024 begins, there are many things we are looking forward to in the new year, including a quickly approaching Wave 2024 featuring ESO Training Academy, as well as a variety of new ESO features and product enhancements. As always, we take your feedback into account every step of the way, which is why we like to keep you in the loop for the exciting things to come. Here are a few highlights from Q4 and what we’re looking forward to in the new year:   

New Resource Center for ESO Suite

Relevant to all ESO customers 

In ESO’s new Resource Center, you will now be able to quickly and easily find the latest release notes for your desired application. On nearly every ESO app, access the Resource Center from the blue question mark badge located in the bottom righthand corner of the app. When clicked, you’ll discover the relevant release notes under “Updates,” links to register for live training webinars, and other helpful articles. This new feature eliminates the need to visit the Release Notes page and scroll through all applications to find the information you need.

Electronic Health Record: Force Sync 

Relevant to ESO EHR users 

The new Electronic Health Record (EHR) Force Sync feature allows EHR administrators to sync a record in mobile status to the web, instead of calling support. For instance, if your tablet is broken, no need to worry. Administrators with the Force Sync permission can find records on the Incident List as well as access them from the Force Sync tab in the Options Menu – saving you time by eliminating phone calls or support cases.

Quality Management: Auto-Assign

Relevant to EMS customers 

The brand-new Quality Management (QM) Auto-Assign feature allows admins to automatically assign QM reviews to a specific QM reviewer based off specific criteria, such as patient release disposition, cardiac arrest, or COVID calls. This long-awaited feature was requested by large and small agencies alike and will help automate and streamline previously manual workflows. 

Inspections: Reinspection Workflow 

Relevant to Fire customers 

For our fire customers, the new workflow for Reinspection now captures the parent inspection’s violation information and allows for violations to be properly “resolved.” This new workflow will help reduce the complexity and frustration caused by the previous manual interventions needed.

Fire Incidents: Configurable Validations 

Relevant to Fire customers 

We added several new configurable validation rules to Admin so users can determine whether to require certain fields, such as:  

• Exposure and Decontamination Conditionally Required 
• Unit Arrival Time Always Required 
• Unit Clear Time Always Required 
• Unit Dispatch Always Required 
• Unit Enroute Time Always Required 

This update is the direct result of customer configurability requests. In particular, the validation for exposure and decontamination is part of the industry-wide effort to improve data collection for firefighter cancer research being done by groups like NIOSH and ESO’s own RPi team (Discrepancies in Firefighter Decontamination Practices). 

Patient Registry Launch 

Relevant to Hospital customers 

In Q4/2023, we partnered closely with our ESO Registry Beta customers to refine our new best-in-class Patient Registry product. We improved the user workflow for Performance Improvement processes, refined our data quality validations, and created the first set of out–of–the–box Insights dashboards. The onboarding process for customers in our Early Adopter program will begin this quarter.  

Health Data Exchange: Hospital Insights 

Relevant to Hospital customers 

The new Health Data Exchange (HDE) Insights dashboards give Hospital users an unprecedented, broadened view of EMS data. You’ll now have the flexibility to get ready-to-use dashboards that surface critical information on your EMS volume, off-load times and service line specific performance metrics. These reports will dramatically reduce manual effort to report on monthly EMS arrivals. With one click, service line leaders can analyze volume trends, produce EMS accreditation measures and identify opportunities for performance improvement and injury prevention by transport agency and/or community.  

Users can customize the dashboard to suit your specific needs. Data from the specific reports within the dashboards can be emailed to key decision makers within your facility to keep everyone informed of how your facility is performing.  

Health Data Exchange: EHR Insights 

Relevant to EMS customers 

Integrating Insights with HDE Outcomes data in our HDE EHR system marks a significant leap forward. Between Insights’ many features and Outcomes’ data model, you can expect enhanced data analysis capabilities, along with a more holistic view of operations and outcomes. 

State EMS Operational Reports 

Relevant to State and Government customers 

The EMS State Repository product has been updated to include Data Quality Charts and Monthly Submission Reports. This will allow state data managers to now use powerful visualization tools to monitor the information flow into their repositories and identify which EMS agencies have been helpful in complying with regulatory requirements. These operational reports will increase the quality of data a state has to benchmark and improve community health and safety. 

Activities: Rostering 

Relevant to Fire customers 

Another update inspired by customer feedback, Rostering allows users to create a daily roster that syncs incidents in ESO Activities. This slick new tool makes it easy for officers to quickly spin up the roster for the day, see the right crews on the right reports, and log it within the Activities Logbook. Given Activities is the operational hub for task management in ESO Suite, the inclusion of Rostering further rounds out key Activities functionality. 

ODL: Upload Your Own Content

Relevant to all ESO customers 

In Customers can now upload their own training content to ODL! With this new feature, customers have the ability to put their own training content alongside ESO’s, creating a single repository for all training material. This alleviates a few challenges in the old system, including accessibility and log-in requirements.   

What to expect in Q1 2024? 

We have a few more exciting enhancements in the works for early 2024. Please stay tuned for release notes and the next product blog, but here’s a sneak preview of a few updates we have planned:

EMS 

• More critical care related treatments and forms in EHR 
• QM data in Insights 

Fire

• New Permits & Hydrants in Insights 
• Inspections Print Updates 
• IRWIN Integration 
• Properties External API 

Shared Apps

• New PM & Activities reporting in Insights  
• New Inventory Controlled Substances reporting in Insights 
• Equipment ID & Nested Checklist items  

Hospital

• Patient Registry compliance in Early Adopter states  
• PRQ & Audit Insights Dashboards 
• HDE Discrete Cancellation Message 

Cross-Product / ESO Suite

• In-App Customer Feedback  
• Enhancements for self-service Onboarding Guide to make it more usable to customers upgrading to ESO Suite from acquired applications 
• Federated Single-Sign On using SAML 2.0 (please note that for now this excludes agencies using EHR Windows Mobile)  
• Premium Dashboards incl. GIS/Mapping 
• Enhancements to Data Exporter  

To see these enhancements in action, learn more about the ESO product roadmap, or speak directly with one of our product experts, be sure to join us at Wave 2024 featuring ESO Training Academy from April 2-5 in Austin, Texas. Register today to secure your spot!  

Want to see the updates from Fall 2023? Visit the previous blog here.  

About Product Management at ESO 

The Product Management team creates the Product Roadmap, which includes deciding on which products, features, and functionality we build out next. We collaborate daily with support, sales, customer success, our industry experts and executives, and most importantly with our customers and users to find out how we can best advance ESO’s mission of improving community health and safety through the power of data.

Among many other initiatives, we’re currently working on ways to engage with you, our users, more deeply. Following the implementation of the in-app Resource Center, we’re now experimenting with ways to get customers to submit ideas and provide feature enhancement requests in-app. This will provide us with more visibility, a better ability to triage and categorize requests, and a means to communicate back to you, our users, on what we’re working on and why.  

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming weeks as we continue our journey to enhance your experience with ESO products!