Prehospital practitioners have an ever-expanding role in managing acutely unwell and injured patients. Despite this large contribution to patient care, most practitioners find it challenging to follow up or get feedback on their patient management.
To all hospital staff who refuse to give paramedics clinical updates because “it’s a privacy breach”: it isn’t. Prehospital providers are part of the team caring for the patient and are entitled to feedback on patient outcomes. https://t.co/OTk9IfKbuY
— David Anderson (@expensivecare) August 1, 2020
The recent publication of the NEMSMA position paper regarding bi-directional information sharing between hospitals and EMS agencies sparked debate on Twitter about the challenges of EMS Feedback.
What was the paper about?
The NEMSMA Position statement and White Paper focus on bidirectional data sharing between EMS agencies and receiving hospitals. The authors examined the challenges EMS agencies face in getting feedback data regarding patient outcomes, proposed best practices for bidirectional data sharing, and explored the current barriers to data exchange.
The paper highlights the importance of receiving feedback and patient outcome data for quality assurance and improvement (QA/QI). Feedback is necessary for EMS providers to determine, among other things, whether clinical diagnoses in the field were correct, whether pre-arrival notifications were effective, and whether the destination choice was appropriate.
The authors surmise that with confusing and complicated healthcare law, hospitals can be reluctant to “share information due to consequences of unintentional violations” of healthcare law and fears of liability, many of which are misconceptions.
They report that…
“Many of the commonly held legal concerns preventing data exchange are misunderstandings and unfounded fears. While all regulations and laws need to be adequately addressed, legal issues should not preclude properly conducted sharing of electronic health records for quality improvement.”
Technology also creates several barriers to data sharing, particularly poor interoperability between EMS electronic patient care records (ePCR) and hospital electronic healthcare records (EHR). The absence of a universal patient identification value is another significant obstacle.
The authors reference information blocking and market competition between hospitals as two big political and economic barriers that can be among the most challenging to overcome.
They conclude by recommending a collaborative effort between EMS agencies and hospitals to develop and implement bilateral data exchange policies which would benefit all stakeholders.
This paper focuses mainly on data sharing at an organisational level, and it is relevant to the difficulties faced by individual pre-hospital practitioners trying to follow up on patients they treat locally.
Why is this so important?
As discussed in the paper, feedback is important for quality improvement. For individual practitioners, feedback is a vital part of the learning cycle. Feedback is essential to learn from our mistakes and improve our practice. To improve any performance, it is necessary to measure it. A practitioner who never follows up on a patient’s outcome will be left assuming that their treatment for the presenting complaint was accurate and warranted. They will likely continue to treat the same presentation similarly because their experience has never been challenged by facts that could have been discovered during patient follow-up.
Without feedback, we could be unconsciously incompetent… We don’t know what we don’t know!
What’s the difficulty?
On an individual level, obtaining feedback and patient follow-up is challenging for EMS crews for various reasons. In a local survey of 98 prehospital practitioners in Dublin, Ireland, only 21% of practitioners reported being able to follow up on interesting cases.
With the dynamic deployment of EMS Resources, crews might transport patients to a hospital and not return to that same hospital during their shift. If a crew finds an opportunity to call back to the hospital frequently, the diagnostic work-up may be incomplete, and a working diagnosis is unclear. EDs are busy environments; understandably, some practitioners may feel uncomfortable stopping a doctor or nurse to follow up on a previous patient.
Calling back a few days later has its complications; often, different staff in the department may not have been involved in the patient’s care. This method may work for the high-acuity resus presentations, but for that ‘child with shortness of breath’ whose physical exam you were unsure of or the child with a seizure who had a subtle weakness… the chances of the Emergency Department (ED) staff remembering their diagnosis or outcome is slim!
Phoning the ED or ward is a route explored by many practitioners. Still, it is fraught with increasing difficulty due to the reluctance of staff to give out patient information over the phone, fearing confidentiality issues.
So, how do we address this challenge?
Focusing specifically on providing feedback to individual pre-hospital practitioners, there are multiple potential ways to provide them with follow-up information and feedback. However, you need to consider what system will work best for your individual department, ensuring patient confidentiality and data security.
The pre-hospital postbox
St. Vincent’s University Hospital is a tertiary referral hospital in Dublin, Ireland, with approximately 60,000 annual attendances. Inspired by Linda Dykes and her team’s PHEM postbox at Ysbyty Gwynedd Emergency Department in Bangor, Wales, we set up the Pre-Hospital Post Box in St. Vincent’s University Hospital Emergency Department in August 2017.
Our first #EMSFeedback request @edsvuh!
— #HelloMyNameIs Andy (@AndyPattonIRL) August 26, 2017
The Pre-Hospital Post Box is open for business!
Thanks @YGEDBangor for the support! pic.twitter.com/FFkMgVR4Dr
We engaged local prehospital clinicians and ED consultants to develop an SOP. The carpentry department built and mounted a postbox. Using a template from Bangor, a feedback request form was developed. Finally, the service was advertised in the emergency department, local Ambulances, and Fire Stations, and we were open for business.
Prehospital clinicians seeking feedback on a case complete a form and place it in the postbox. An EM doctor reviews the case notes, and feedback is provided via phone call.
Feedback is only provided to practitioners directly involved with patient care to ensure patient confidentiality. A triple-check procedure is used to confirm this. The practitioner’s PIN on the request form is verified on the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council (PHECC) register and against the patient care record. The listed phone number is also verified through practitioners known to us or the local Ambulance Officer.
Other hospitals use systems providing feedback via encrypted email accounts or posted letters. We elected to use a phone call system. The primary reason was the anecdotal reports that many of our pre-hospital staff don’t have easy access to work email accounts. We also anticipated that a phone call would be more likely to facilitate a case discussion and allow paramedics to ask questions that might arise during the discussion.
Challenges with this system?
Providing feedback to prehospital practitioners is time-consuming and labour-intensive, particularly in hospital systems where most clinical documentation is still paper-based. In our system, where handwritten ED notes are scanned, radiology, labs and discharge letters are available online, and in-patient notes are handwritten physical charts – we’ve found the average time required to collate details for the feedback request is just 9 minutes, with a feedback phone call averaging 5 minutes per call.
To upscale this would require a team of doctors or a rota-based system with allocated non-clinical time to answer requests. Alternatively, a digital solution allowing paramedics to access the data themselves or facilitating the physician managing the case to reply directly would make it more feasible but may generate further challenges.
As discussed in the NEMSMA paper, the ideal would be an organisational process, with the automatic provision of discharge summaries and hospital test results to EMS agencies, providing useful organisational data and subsequent feedback to individual EMS practitioners.
GDPR / Data Protection Considerations
Patient confidentiality and data protection are paramount in an EMS Feedback System. The system implemented needs robust mechanisms, such as our triple-check, to ensure that feedback is only provided to healthcare professionals directly involved in the patient’s care.
It is also important that it is compliant with data protection legislation in your locality, such as the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) introduced in Europe in 2018. Our EMS feedback system is an important mechanism for reviewing the care and treatment provided to patients. It allows us to assist pre-hospital practitioners in evaluating and improving the safety of our pre-hospital services, which is provided for in the “HSE Privacy Notice – Patients & Service Users.”
In its current form, providing EMS feedback is a labour-intensive process, but we believe it is a worthwhile initiative. Pre-hospital practitioners greatly appreciate it, as it enables them to enhance their diagnostic performance and develop their clinical practice.
If you’d like to learn more about setting up a Pre-Hospital Post Box in your ED, look at these resources…
Attachments
References
Patton A, Menzies D. Feedback for pre-hospital practitioners: is there an appetite? Poster session presented at: 2017 Annual Scientific Meeting of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine; 2017 Oct 19-20; Galway, Ireland.
Gunderson MR ,Florin A , Price M & Reed J.(2020): NEMSMA Position Statement and White Paper: Process and Outcomes DataSharing between EMS and Receiving Hospitals, Prehospital Emergency Care, https://doi.org/10.1080/10903127.2020.1792017
Croskerry P. The feedback sanction. Acad Emerg Med. 2000;7:1232-8.
Jenkinson E, Hayman T, Bleetman A. Clinical feedback to ambulance crews: supporting professional development. Emerg Med J. 2009;26:309.
Patton A, Menzies D. Case feedback requests from pre-hospital practitioners – what do they want to know? Meeting Abstracts: London Trauma Conference, London Cardiac Arrest Symposium, London Pre-hospital Care Conference 2018. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med 27, 66 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13049-019-0639-x
Patton A, Menzies D. Feedback for pre-hospital practitioners – a quality improvement initiative. Meeting Abstracts: London Trauma Conference, London Cardiac Arrest Symposium, London Pre-hospital Care Conference 2018. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med 27, 66 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13049-019-0639-x
O’Sullivan J. HSE Privacy Notice – Patients & Service Users v1.2. 2020 Feb, Accessed on-line: https://www.hse.ie/eng/gdpr/hse-data-protection-policy/hse-privacynotice-service-users.pdf
