Saving Time & Improving Outcomes with ESO HDE
How Memorial Regional Hospital Integrated EMS Data for Improved Trauma Registry Compliance & Outcomes
Executive summary
The trauma registry team at Memorial Regional Hospital spent hours every week collecting the EMS run records needed to maintain compliance and improve patient care. After launching ESO Health Data Exchange (HDE), record delivery arrived automatically in the hospital EHR, saving the team time and lifting compliance.
Quick stats
Level I trauma center in Hollywood, Florida.
The challenge: a lack of timely, actionable insights
Roberta Kopolovits, PTA, CSTR, CAISS, often played data detective as Registry Supervisor. Her role covers entering data accurately into the hospital trauma database, maintaining compliance standards, and meeting hospital, state, and national metrics. Every trauma patient arriving at the hospital needs a complete record of care from prehospital through discharge for the hospital to stay compliant, treat appropriately, and improve quality.
The EMS run report is a core part of that record. Prehospital data tell the trauma team what treatments, fluids, and medications were administered before arrival, and help streamline billing. Knowing the mechanism of injury also helps the team look for potential injury patterns.
Getting that report in time was where the detective work came in. When local EMS agencies transported patients, the patient care report was supposed to arrive with them, but it usually did not. “Ninety percent of the time, EMS wouldn’t leave a copy of the run report for us to review, so we had to chase it down,” Kopolovits notes.
Every Friday morning the team exported the list of missing run reports from the trauma database and spent most of the day playing phone and email tag with EMS providers. The work continued once the reports arrived. As Kopolovits describes it, the team then had to scan them in, upload them into the registry software, submit them for entry into the EMR, and file them.
The time involved began to wear on morale. “Every Friday, we would be consumed with gathering those outstanding reports. People dreaded Fridays around here. Team members were stressed because they invested their whole shift into chasing down those records. The time we spent retrieving and adding the missing reports would take us away from abstracting and coding records to maintain compliance, standards, and improve patient care.”
Before and after
- Identify missing records
- Divide the missing records list across teams
- Search and wait for records
- Scan records into the registry
- Open registry software
- View EMS data within the patient record
The discovery: ESO Health Data Exchange
Kopolovits and her team were introduced to HDE through Hollywood Fire Rescue, one of their local prehospital providers. The Hollywood Fire Rescue chief met with the medical director from the Memorial Regional emergency department to look at what an HDE implementation could offer the hospital, the transporting medics, and the EMS agencies.
“We realized that we could all benefit from having timely and efficient access to the EMS records, so our healthcare system decided to sign the collaborative agreement and begin the data exchange,” says Kopolovits. “All of the emergency department medical directors across the healthcare system and EMS Chiefs met to discuss what HDE would look like for their departments and all felt the HDE was needed on both the hospital and EMS side.”
Implementation was straightforward. Instead of faxing or printing run reports after transport, medics enter the patient hospital encounter number in their ePCR record, capturing it with a barcode scanner from the patient armband, face sheet, or sticker.
“HDE is so simple to learn. On the hospital side, it only took us a few hours of training to learn where to find the records in our Epic EHR and, from there, moral and efficiency got a whole lot better.”
Roberta Kopolovits, PTA, CSTR, CAISS, Registry Supervisor, Memorial Regional Hospital
It took some patience to get EMS partners scanning consistently, but the habit formed quickly. “We had a bit of a learning curve with medics remembering to use the barcode scanner, but once they got the hang of it, we saw a huge improvement in receiving records.”
Impact: saving time and staying compliant
“The process is so much smoother. It requires less manual time on our part, and we’ve been able to exceed the compliance requirements we were missing previously,” says Kopolovits. The team is compliant with state and national guidelines and has hit its goal of closing out all records within 60 days of patient arrival.
Fridays look different now, too. “There’s been a greater closure rate with abstracting our records now that we don’t have to waste time looking for run reports each week. We’re saving trees, time, efficiency and our sanity.”
Kopolovits believes every registry team would benefit, adding: “HDE is a no-brainer. The monetary factor comes back to you 10-fold when your employees are less stressed, able to spend more time coding and analyzing the data, and you see your compliance metrics continually improve.”
The relationship with EMS agencies has improved as well. “Before, we might call our EMS partners or they would call or email us for updates on outcomes, but now they automatically receive data outcomes as they occur, which makes data sharing much easier.” EMS agencies also spend less time finding and sending reports, and both sides now share access to key parts of each patient record.
Looking ahead, the hospital injury prevention coordinator is using HDE data to pinpoint where traumatic injuries occur geographically, in order to build targeted outreach and prevention programs.
“This data is a real game-changer for us.”
Roberta Kopolovits, PTA, CSTR, CAISS, Registry Supervisor, Memorial Regional Hospital
See how ESO Health Data Exchange can deliver EMS data into your registry software to maintain compliance and provide the insights that shape patient care.
