AIM salutes Rescue Heroes that serve our communities to keep us safe every time an emergency 911 EMS/Fire call comes in. This March we are celebrating Firefighter Kenneth Taggart’s 2017 Rookie of the Year Award. Firefighter Taggart was recently awarded Probationary Firefighter of the Year for Frederick County Fire & Rescue Services in Maryland. The award was presented at Frederick County Chamber of Commerce’s 6th annual Public Safety Awards in Brunswick, MD on March 7, 2017.

Opting for cloud-based services not only gives your EMS agency cost savings, but gives your staff access to quality integrated online workflow process. Higher costs, less reimbursement, tightening regulations, less manpower are just a few of the struggles EMS/Ambulance agencies are facing. Add the effects of aging data and server systems can be enough to put your EMS agency on the edge of disaster. Opting for cloud based services not only gives your EMS agency cost savings, but gives your staff access to quality integrated online workflow processes that will improve efficiency from call intake all the way through to reimbursement.

From dispatch to collections, learn how finding a unified operational solution for your EMS agency can increase compliance and reduce overhead costs. EMS1 published an informative article on the 5 ways an end-to-end EMS solution can improve your agency, from call intake, to transport, to billing—creating an efficient online workflow that can be accessed anywhere. Here's a brief overview of the 5 ways.

February is American Heart Month, so we wanted to spotlight the important role EMS plays in Heart Disease awareness and outcomes. The leading cause of death in the United States, for both men and women, is heart disease, and with February marked as American Heart Month, we wanted to spotlight the important role EMS plays in Heart Disease awareness and outcomes. EMS dispatch and patient care are the first line of defense when a cardiac arrest call comes in to 911. Unfortunately, time is the enemy for cardiac patients. Life and death can be determined by the patient delaying a call to 911, making the role of dispatch and emergency care critically important.

There's a good reason that medical practices, hospitals, and EMS agencies are willing to trust cloud-based services. Is working in the cloud the right option for EMS? If you listen to the experts at InfoWorld, it is the only option no matter what your industry, but it is not difficult to understand the special concerns of emergency service providers. EMS has a responsibility to the public that includes keeping their personal information private. At the same time, the EMS community is facing the same budget restrictions and security issues as any other medical business. Health care reform is tightening regulations for every discipline including emergency medical services. To understand why EMS is moving to the cloud, you need to know more about the technology.

Fighting and pleading with facilities to get the proper documentation so that you can transport a patient under medical necessity is an age old problem. EMS agencies that handle ambulance dispatch and non-emergency transports often find themselves stuck in the middle, with a facility on one side, Medicare on the other, and the poor patient waiting in the wings. Many facilities don't want to take responsibility or accountability for their part, and Medicare is finally starting the recognize the struggles EMS has with getting facilities to cooperate.

In an effort to reduce improper payments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented several initiatives with the goal of identifying and addressing billing errors. In 2015 The Federal Government estimated that about 12.7 percent of all Medicare Fee-For-Service (FFS) claim payments were improper. In an effort to reduce these improper payments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented several initiatives with the goal of identifying and addressing billing errors. One of these initiatives is a Prepayment Review, where claims submitted with a certain criteria are automatically pulled and reviewed prior to receiving payment. No big deal if you're doing everything right, right? Wrong! You could have exceptional documentation and above average accuracy rates and still be subject to this type of review simply due to the fact that you fit the audit profile. For ambulance agencies, the profile is typically a service that performs a high volume of non-emergency transports and/or has been flagged in the past for high denial rates.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should move to AIM's online EMS Dispatch, ePCR, and medical billing software. Your server is on fire. Your system administrator just quit. Your computer has translated everything into hieroglyphs. Your hard drive sounds like a food processor. Your surge protector is glowing. Your keyboard is now coffee-colored and -flavored. Your computer display is doing cartwheels. Your software never has bugs; it just develops random features. Your definition of hardware is “the kickable parts of a computer system”. Your system administrator looks like he just survived a fistfight with a swamp monster… and lost. All good comedy comes from personal experience. Everyone can laugh about computer problems because we all have dealt with them at one point or another. The good news is, with AIM Online, you don’t have to. By relocating your business to our cloud, we can alleviate your stress, improve your processes, and propel your business to new financial and productive heights.

As these relate to EMS workflow, metrics/KPI’s are a way to evaluate how your own organizational processes are performing. In relation to EMS workflow, metrics/KPI’s are a way to evaluate how your own organizational processes are performing. Are they working to the highest level possible, or is there room for improvement? Are you providing timely patient care? Is your response time up-to-speed? Is the turnaround time from dispatch to trip to bill to reimbursement acceptable? Are you meeting cash flow thresholds throughout the month? We will look at these questions and more, in the following overview of metrics/KPI’s and their role in the 5 critical phases of an optimized EMS workflow. The purpose of metrics in process/quality improvement is to develop measurable service delivery standards and evaluate/benchmark EMS organizational performance against those standards.

An efficient and powerful workflow is important to successful EMS dispatch, ePCR, and medical billing. What is workflow? At its most basic level, workflow is the series of activities that are necessary to complete a task. This definition includes everything from planning dinner to managing an efficient and successful EMS organization. However, the more complex a given workflow, the greater the need for optimization, efficiency and integration of processes.