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 [...]
A couple of years ago I had our folks in the Bureau of EMS and Trauma System write a guidance document on what we believe is appropriate to include in ambulance contracts. We noticed that these contracts were getting very complicated and included a whole lot of stuff that was very expensive… but that didn’t have much to [...]
We’ve been monitoring the response times for the big ambulance service provider - Rural Metro – since they went into bankruptcy in August. They have 13 different ambulance services in Arizona and we want to make sure that they're meeting the grade during their reorganization. We asked them to send us monthly reports on their response times [...]
Arizona’s public health and healthcare system teamed up with the ADHS including our Bureau of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and the Arizona Division of Emergency Management last week in one of the largest preparedness exercises of the year. The objective was to test and build preparedness capabilities across the emergency management system in AZ. More than 3,000 [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I introduced the concept of “Over Triage”… which is when EMS transports a patient to the highest level of care (like a level I trauma center) when they could have taken them to a level III or IV trauma center closer to their home. The downside of over-triage is that [...]
A couple of months ago the Rural/Metro Corporation filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Last month I sent them a detailed letter asking for a host of financial and operational information about the company in order to determine whether the company still meets our statutory mandate (ARS 36-2201) and rules requirement (AAC R9-25-912(A)) [...]
One of the most important aspects of public health is sharing effective, creative ideas with other public health agencies so more people can benefit from what we learn. Each year the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials highlights really good programs with their Vision Awards. This year, they selected 2 from Arizona to share [...]
Earlier this week the Rural/Metro Corporation (a large provider of private ambulance in Arizona) announced that it had filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The Company announced that the bankruptcy action will allow the company to… “significantly reduce its debt, renegotiate unprofitable contracts and free [...]
Traumatic brain injury is involved in about 1/3 of all injury-related deaths- it’s clearly a public health issue. That’s why we created Arizona's Excellence in Pre-hospital Injury Care project- which is aimed at improving brain injury outcomes in AZ. The National Institutes of Health chose AZ as the only state to evaluate the national standards [...]
Sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death in Arizona (7,600/year). Because Arizona’s EMS agencies (including more and more 911 centers) have implemented key interventions, the survival rate from Sudden Cardiac Arrest in Arizona has increased by 300% since 2004. Arizona’s pre-hospital and EMS system has become a model that has been adopted across [...]
