Performance Information Systems to Improve Rural Mobile Emergency Medical Services

This paper analyzes end-to-end performance of EMS providers. Continually under pressure to reduce disabilities and fatalities, EMS providers need timely and accurate incident related information within the critical “golden hour” of emergency response, especially in rural areas where approximately 60% of all vehicle fatalities occur. In this study, a multi-method analysis was conducted around an embedded case study in rural Minnesota to better understand and evaluate end-to-end performance of emergency response under normal and crisis conditions. Researchers used field interviews and agency data to develop an ontological knowledgebase for EMS data and then used this factual ontology to test end-to-end performance through a simulation software called ARENA. Findings suggest that (1) there is a lack of systematic inter-connected information about rural EMS performance, and, (2) under typical crisis conditions the system is overloaded and that may affect the dispatch performance of the end-to-end process.