Two weeks ago, we started a Community of Practice to discuss EMS Deployment. The larger issue of deploying resources is all about efficiency and effectiveness in care, those are also the aims of any High Performance EMS group. However, that message is too often confused with meaning simply “better, faster, cheaper”, when in practice it […]

We always hear that EMS is still a relatively new discipline. And in the scheme of medicine, or even public safety, that is certainly true. But we shouldn’t let the fact of its youth keep us from acknowledging that it has already been around long enough to accumulate some of its very own antiquated dogma. If you […]

The increasing demand for healthcare services which threatened their ability to maintain response times is another example of what motivates the Cetronia mindset of continual improvement and motivating them to become a High Performance EMS.

Several months ago, Rob Lawrence of the Richmond Ambulance Authority started a thread on the High Performance EMS Group of LinkedIn by asking “So what does the phrase ‘High Performance EMS’ mean to you?” This innocent sounding question sparked immediate debate even within the small group at that time. Benjamin Podsiadlo of AMR quickly tied the quality […]

It doesn’t take long in an EMT career before the excitement of “rushing to an emergency” turns in to “just another transport call.” The philosophy of “you call, we haul” in nearly every service can break the community servant’s spirit by turning a skilled paramedic into just an ambulance driver. But our system “just is […]

There are two fundamental ways to save money: either cut your budget and make do with less resources or invest in process efficiency to cut future expenses while continuing to provide at least the same level of service. These are important considerations as the costs of doing business clearly continue to increase, whether we consider […]

I have read the positions stating that calls for emergency services are completely random (justifying the reason they are often called “accidents”) and therefore not able to be predicted. But both academic literature and practical experience show that demand prediction can be an effective tool in helping to balance scarce resources (ambulances and their trained crews) with public demand (requests for emergency responses even […]