On previous Blogs I’ve shared information about Community Integrated Paramedicine. One of the most promising opportunities for Community Paramedicine is in working with hospitals to prevent readmission of patients with diseases like diabetes, asthma or congestive heart failure. It’s also a great opportunity for EMS providers to provide some coaching on other prevention initiatives including childhood immunizations, smoking prevention and chronic disease prevention.
Our Bureau of EMS and Trauma System hosted the first meeting of the workgroup a few weeks ago. Membership was solicited from each of the four EMS regions representing various components of emergency medical care. The participants have an aggressive agenda to research a number of topic areas, and then provide updates on these to the full workgroup.
The deliverable from this workgroup will be a report that includes a survey of what Community Paramedicine initiatives look like and recommendations for what type of guidelines may need to be developed to move this promising practice forward. The next meeting of the workgroup is February 20th. Leveraging our state’s EMS system to improve health outcomes via Community Paramedicine is one of my top priorities this year… and our EMS team will be investing a fair amount of their time on it this year.
