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 [...]

You have been given the task of establishing a quality assurance/quality control program for your department or agency. Your boss tells you, “I want you to look at some of our PCR’s and make sure that they are up to snuff!” You have no parameters to rely on; you don’t [...]

Look up EMS CQI on the internet and you will find a wide variety of material related to how to perform CQI. What to measure, how to measure it, what and who you should be comparing yourself to. The list goes on and on. In fact, you could say everything [...]

Back in 2005, I had no idea if outsourcing EMS quality improvement was a concept that could work. There were virtually no private companies devoted to performing EMS quality improvement services. I certainly heard plenty of reasons as to why outsourcing CQI was a bad idea, but it seemed to [...]