Celebrating the EMS 1%’ers: The Expert Reviewers Behind The G&A Way! In emergency medicine, excellence isn’t optional—it’s essential. Nowhere is that more evident than in the elite ranks of EMS documentation professionals known as the EMS 1%’ers at Girard & Associates, Inc. Our expert reviewers represent the top tier of [...]

Girard & Associates Delivers Unbiased, Expert EMS Run Report Reviews That Protect Patients, Providers—and Reputations! Could your patient care report withstand the scrutiny of a nationally televised murder trial—or protect you from charges if a critical mistake leads to tragedy? For EMS professionals, a single documentation error can carry life-or-death [...]

What Is NEMSIS, and Where Did It Come From? NEMSIS — the National Emergency Medical Services Information System — is a federally supported data standard allowing EMS agencies to collect and submit patient care data in a consistent format. Developed in the early 2000s by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), it was [...]

The Secret of a Successful EMS CQI Coach: Understanding the “Why” If you want to up your CQI game, perhaps a change in strategy is in order. Many, if not most, CQI professionals spend most of their time trying to understand what went wrong on a call. That is a [...]

Why is EMS CQI so Hard? One of the most common discussions I have with EMS CQI coordinators  is, why is CQI so hard?  Coordinators will list a litany of problems. Why do providers not like feedback? Why do the same problems keep popping up? Why do I get so  [...]

It all starts with a good audit. The art of auditing an EMS run report is about identifying what can potentially be improved upon in the patient care experience. An audit is not just about identifying what went wrong. It is about determining what can be done better. Most EMS [...]

Ask many EMS CQI professionals how they CQI stroke calls and you are likely to hear their efforts revolve around recognition, treatment, and stroke alert notifications. Certainly, that is a good place to start. But as with all CQI efforts, simply collecting data points to produce reports and statistics [...]

In the EMS world, there is increased importance placed on the need for proper documentation. For anyone paying attention for the past several years, many EMS experts have been calling for providers to be more detailed in documenting patient encounters. As an EMS CQI company, Girard & Associates has always [...]

When most people consider how best to CQI cardiac/ACS patients, most consider the monitoring and reporting of STEMI recognition, STEMI point of entry, and the timely administration of ASA as their criteria for measurement. While these are common and certainly appropriate metrics to consider when attempting to determine if your [...]

It has often been said that one of the riskier things an EMS provider can do is to accept and write up a patient refusal. In many cases patients refuse care and later, when something bad happens they may look for a reason to point the finger at bad advice [...]