Sharing Data to Improve Patient Care

When Rogelio Martinez, MPH, data and quality assurance section chief for the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), asked EMS agencies in his state what issues they faced in providing patient care, he heard one answer repeatedly: How could they get information about what happened to patients after they treated them? That would help them better evaluate the care they were providing.

It seemed like a basic request, but there was an obstacle. “We had these two different databases that weren’t talking to each other,” Martinez says, referring to EMS data and hospital data.

Now, with the help of the data-management and analysis company ImageTrend, ADHS has a secure, HIPAA-compliant way to access data from both sources and look at patient outcomes. It recently released its first statewide report. “We looked at confirmed strokes from the hospital,” says Martinez. “How many times did EMS think it was a stroke or document that it was a stroke? How many times did they get it right or wrong?” In addition to statewide data, each individual agency can access reports comparing its performance to the aggregate.

The response from the EMS agencies has been enthusiastic. “We’ve heard from a few agencies that it’s already changing the way they educate their staff,” says Martinez. “It’s changing the way they have their policies in place and how they respond to some of these conditions.”

Moving forward, Martinez hopes to provide the agencies more detailed information—for example, at the level of individual patient records. “So we can say, ‘This was a confirmed stroke. But the EMS agency didn’t identify it as a stroke…’ Is there something that could have clued that provider in to think stroke rather than something else?”

And he hopes to report on conditions beyond just stroke: “It’s also sepsis and trauma and cardiac arrest,” he says. “Anything that EMS touches has a potential to be influenced by this outcome information.”

Reports like the ones the ADHS is developing will answer EMS agencies’ longstanding request for data to evaluate and improve their performance. “Providers really want to do the best for their patients,” Martinez says. “Not having the right information available at the time they need it prevents them from optimizing the care they can provide. So that’s what we tried to solve.”