When Hospitals and EMS Share Data
Recently, the Journal of EMS (JEMS) featured ESO Health Data Exchange customer St. Elizabeth Healthcare for their collaborative data sharing with EMS. In short, the St. Elizabeth team realized they needed better prehospital data for the best possible patient outcomes and selected ESO Health Data Exchange to help get the job done.
From their implementation through use, EMS Coordinator Joshua Ishmael shared these three lessons with JEMS. Here they are, as written in the JEMS article.
- Buy-In Is Essential
When you’re implementing a new system, you need to ensure that you’ve got buy-in from everyone in advance. For us, we made sure we had everyone from technical support to field paramedics in the room to talk about the benefits of health data exchange (HDE) across teams. By creating the buy-in early on, the rollout was much smoother because everyone understood their role and what they gained from HDE.
- Decide on the Right Data
Data sharing is essential for outcome improvement and stronger care delivery systems. However, deciding on the “right” data to share between multiple organizations takes time and planning. I would recommend creating a shared data dictionary so that the exchanged data elements are clinically relevant and can be utilized for improving care.
- Leverage Analytics for Evidence-Based Practice
Receiving and exchanging data are only part of the solution. You also need to take those data points and translate them into evidence-based practices to really see the full benefit of HDE. We’re looking at changing protocols based on the data we’ve received and analyzed.
You can read their full story on the JEMS website or in their case study on our website.
About ESO Health Data Exchange (HDE)
HDE provides true bidirectional data sharing – the EMS record flows directly into the hospital EHR, and hospital clinical outcome information is available to EMS in real time. Data can be shared from or with any EHR or major hospital EMR system in an agnostic “connect once, connect to all” model.