What is your EMS age? Sometimes, gauging your EMS age can be as simple as recalling the model number of your first cardiac monitor. Or, these days, it could be gauged by how you keep track of or store your EMS data.

Creating a clinically solid, medically sound, and billing-compliant EMS patient care record is critical not just to patient health, but EMS operational health as well. How is your EMS operations measuring up? How do you use key metrics to improve your EMS data entry and documentation?

EMS agencies have been talking about if/when to move away from paper EMS trip reports to electronic EMS trip reports for ages. In the past, the cost comparison between purchasing base computers or ruggedized laptops and handwritten EMS trip reports or scannable forms proved formidable barriers for so many EMS agencies. Thankfully, in recent years as EMS agencies have begun using ePCR software to document EMS trip reports with more frequency, discussions have moved away from paper versus electronic to the benefits of moving to Online EMS software versus on-site software.

We get it! You’ve performed all of the skills you’ve learned since First Responder class, on this one patient. The patient should name a kid after you, or at least the gold fish! Here’s the thing, we can chat all day long about how a call went, and hopefully that detail is in your PCR narrative (maybe minus the part where you used the Hurst tool to break open the patient’s medicine cabinet). But, if you don’t have that billing information on the ePCR and the patient’s signature on the signature form, you might as well call off your next shift. Or, at least hide from the billing office and the supervisor! They will hunt you down! Lack of billing info leads to lack of payment, making it harder for you to continue the lifesaving work we love you for.

Delays in EMS ambulance dispatch disrupt the entire EMS patient care process. What begins as a non-issue can easily expand and impact crew resources, transport vehicle resources, patient satisfaction scores, referring agency satisfaction, and above all, patient care. Certainly, some delays are unavoidable due to traffic or other uncontrollable influences. However, given that ambulance dispatch call delays can completely destroy the successful flow of EMS response to emergency and non-emergency scheduled and non-scheduled patient transport requests, the ambulance system must aim to minimize delays.

Any experienced EMS professional knows how the story goes. You get on scene only to find that you left your paper assessment pad back at the station. You sort through all of your 37 pants and shirt pockets..NOTHING!

While redundancy in phone lines and staff can ensure that no EMS dispatch events go untended, redundancy has no place in data entry. In fact, manual data entry in EMS dispatch can actually create problems of its own. With something as important as EMS dispatch, human error must be mitigated as much as possible. By utilizing a single point of data entry during call-taking and dispatching, the entire EMS dispatch workflow improves.

Managing ambulance medical claims processing can be an extremely complex task—these best practices will help. An insurance claim is a collection of data: We transported this patient (patient demographics) on this day (DOS encounter data). They had this issue (coding), we did this for them (coding), and they have this insurance (insurance data). Get those five pieces of data right, and you will get paid; get any of them wrong or miss any information and getting paid is nothing short of a challenge. To help prevent EMS medical claims processing challenges like getting wrong information or not securing what you need—here are six important best practices to follow.

To keep pace with changes to health care reimbursement, EMS organizations need to reduce inefficiency in revenue cycle management. More people than ever have health insurance under the ACA and, of those, many have Medicaid. With this shift, the average per run reimbursement is lower for many EMS agencies, and the climbing deductibles are making it even more challenging to collect from patients. Additionally, modifications to the ambulance fee schedule have impacted EMS departments and have placed negative pressure on revenue. It's clear that the ACA has impacted EMS reimbursement in many ways, of which, these are only a few.

The new year is quickly approaching—that means new deductibles. How does your EMS Agency plan to handle exposure to deductibles this January? There is no way to completely alleviate the reduction of revenue your EMS agency will experience from deductibles, but there are ways to reduce your exposure. For instance, it's a common EMS billing practice to hold January Medicare Part B claims for 3-4 weeks before submitting. Sometimes it's longer, depending on the length of time that crossover takes. Doing this helps to reduce exposure to deductibles that minimize the number of patient pay claims. In other words, to reduce your exposure to deductibles, don't file too early in the year.