Their Goal
Community risk reduction is a priority at Tempe Fire Medical Rescue. Data is key to ensure their crews are responding appropriately to support a successful Community Paramedicine (CP) program and better serve the 190,000 residents of Tempe, Arizona. They use their data to set new goals to quantify their daily activities, utilize information to help reduce non-emergent 911 calls and keep stakeholders up to date.
It’s often though that all Code 3’s – or lights and siren responses – are always life-threatening situations, but this is not the case. For Tempe Fire, it’s a matter of understanding who is activating 911 and why, and using that data to better serve the community.
Tempe Fire Medical Rescue
Learn how Tempe Fire is using data to support a successful Community Paramedicine (CP) program.
Data Documentation & Extraction
Tempe Fire documents all incidents, including patient encounters, using ImageTrend Elite™ for EMS and Community Health to capture and cultivate the information important to them. Accurate and reliable documentation is the first part to establishing and maintaining a successful operation.
The second and most important part of Tempe Fire is the ability to extract all of the data that has been documented. Utilizing Elite’s built-in reporting and analysis tool, Report Writer, Tempe Fire is able to make data-driven decisions, monitor trends and identify patient populations that are more likely to have an increased demand for emergency services.
Report Writer allows them to create custom reports and utilize a a wide variety of pre-built reports, with the ability to easily share these among other Elite users. Having reporting tools, such as Report Writer, empowers Tempe Fire to support their efforts of turning data into useful information and gain insights on their patient populations.
Extract Data
Custom and Pre-Built Reports
Data Analysis
Gain Insights
The key is a seamless integration between our Community Paramedicine program and EMS. We’re able to form a visual representation of a patient’s contact history by pulling our EMS and CP forms together to make sure we’re coordinating the right type of care.
Dana Cardenas
EMS Coordinator, Tempe Fire
Putting It Together
Tempe Fire now has the data they need at their fingertips to support optimal workflows and focus on forward thinking. Using the information from Report Writer, they are able to feed data into their own predictive analysis model tools to realize key associations and make predictions, such as how likely a patient is to call 911 within the next 30 days.
The reports generated through Report Writer aid Tempe Fire in identifying key components including the number of times a patient has called 911 in a year, to help discover trends early and determine the likelihood of a patient calling again in the future.
By the numbers, Tempe Fire has celebrated major successes in quantifying their call reductions for stakeholders. Their rolling six (6) month performance metric shows about a 49% reduction in non-emergent calls based off run forms that were completed. By focusing on the frequent utilizers of their emergency resources, Tempe Fire not only impacted their reduction in non-emergency call volume, but they also affected other performance measures including response time, insurance costs, crew availability, and more.
It might take firefighters 15 calls to notice a pattern. Our analysis establishes a trend in as few as three calls. We discovered through our predictive analysis model that only two individual patients accounted for an entire percentage of our annual call volume in a response area with a population of 190,000 people.
Daniel Petty
Data Analyst, Tempe Fire
The ability of our EMS platform to work in sync with our Community Paramedicine program to create accurate patient profiles that are all backed by data have greatly benefited our program and community. It’s our continued goal to shape our program and work toward developing a standard curriculum for Community Paramedicine to lead more effective programs across the country.
Dana Cardenas
EMS Coordinator, Tempe Fire
Developing this community awareness allows agencies and departments to do more with their data. The bottom line is that most agencies or departments are already documenting this type of data and that the ability to extract reports of your data makes this next level of analysis possible for your community.
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