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 [...]

A 76-year-old male complaining of chest pain after a motor vehicle crash is assessed by the paramedic/basic crew on scene and the medic determines the patient is low likelihood for an ACS event and triages the call to the BLS partner for transport. I am sure this happens countless times [...]

Ever try to calculate the return on investment of your EMS CQI program? Pretty tough, right? After all, performing QA/QI/CQI functions is intangible and difficult to quantify, especially in financial terms. Not to mention that in strict accounting terms your return on investment is normally a function of how much [...]

Without doubt the most difficult part of performing quality improvement in EMS is, often times having the difficult conversation with coworkers regarding their patient care practices. In fact, one of the main reasons clients hire Girard & Associates is to outsource their QA/QI functions for this very reason. Having this [...]

In any EMS system there are going to be calls where, even with the best of intentions, patients do not receive the care they require. It happens every day and in every system. The fact is the job of providing pre-hospital patient care is a complex and chaotic one. It [...]

EMS Quality Improvement: The Missing Critical Component Does your EMS agency allocate a sufficient amount of resources to its quality improvement initiatives? If it doesn’t, it should! Today’s modern EMS system is expected to perform at the highest levels of clinical care. Unfortunately, many services do not have a solid [...]