PULSE Magazine | May 2019 Issue

about it with several of our employees who are responsible for buying and designing, and I said, “Hey, let’s figure out how to mock up an ambu- lance.” My idea was to have a bunch of our medics walk through the mockup and give us some feed- back. The team built a wooden ambulance out of plywood using the exact dimensions of our ambulance. It included seats, a stretcher, and all the cabinets. We had a hundred medics walk through the mockup with a schematic diagram for our next design. Based on the input we received, we redesigned our ambulances. We don’t get complaints anymore. We get compliments. The medics tell us they finally have ambulances that help them get their jobs done. I would estimate that we’ve probably saved easily $100,000 a year because we don’t have to make repeated modifications. Now when we get an ambulance, it’s ready to work. Turning an ambulance over to a medic crew and they’re smiling and can’t wait to get in it because they’ve heard how cool it is — that’s success. On his mission to promote EMS measurement and transparency We introduced the concept of making our data accessible to everyone. We used an open data platform provided by the city’s internet gurus. Now, we put our data online. Not only can some- one log into our system and look at our perfor- mance, they can also download the data behind it and do their own analyses. It’s forced me to be smarter, faster, quicker, and to find better ways to involve the workforce. For me, it feels like we grew up. We make more intelligent choices because they’re backed up by data. As an industry, EMS doesn’t typically monitor our performance as well as we should. We certainly don’t share the results of what we do know publicly. I personally have set out to change that. One of the things I’ve done is worked with my team to put together a performance dashboard. We’ve identified the areas where we expect key results, including emergency response times and providing recommended evidence-based care. We’ve defined what our measures ought to be and what the results should look like. We’ve made it public.

It required some courage to be so transparent because sometimes you don’t do as well as you want to be doing. But that’s part of what we learned through IHI. It’s okay to not be as good as you want to be. It’s not okay to ignore it. You have to find a way to make it better. On using improvement skills when working with elected officials Our improvement skills help us communicate what our work means to our community. One example is how we’ve responded to our elected officials concerns about the opioid crisis. We took a dive into our data and produced a dashboard that covers the last fiscal year focusing on opioids. We used some techniques that we learned through the IA and the Improvement Coach programs. We were able to produce an infographic utilizing our open data system. It showed the impact on the community and on our organization. It helped us identify a population we could work with. And it was all on one page. I don’t think we ever had the capability before to present our data and say, “This is what this means to us. This is what it means to the community. This is how we can help address the problem.” On his proudest moment as an Improvement Advisor My proudest moment is when I see the results of what we do communicated in an effective way. The world is exposed to data every day. We see it every day, and a lot of times you’re left confused. But our data speaks clearly because one of the things that we’ve learned — and it was almost a sidebar thing that we didn’t anticipate learning — was how to communicate better with information. We’ve learned how to communicate intelligently using data. We display our data better. We think through our charts better. We look and quantify things more deeply than we did before. We learn to aggregate things in intelligent ways that make sense. Whenever we launch a project, we gather together and start by asking, “What’s the aim? What’s the purpose? What are we trying to do? How are we going to measure that? What’s that going to look like when we’re done?” We ask all these simple questions that seem like common sense that we never asked before. I look at that and I say, “Wow. We’ve really made a difference.”

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