Quality Improvement (QI) / Process Improvement (PI)

From New York State Emergency Medical Services Council & New York State Department of Health, Bureau of EMS (Version 1, March 2007)

A definitive guide to learning the basics of prehospital quality improvement. Describes the basics of quality improvement science, followed by a step-by-step plan for choosing and implementing a project in your agency. The intended audience is EMS providers and EMS medical directors. 

The Pediatric Evidence-based Guidelines: Assessment of EMS System Utilization in States (PEGASUS) project guideline development committee developed these quality measures using a consensus-based process—defining potential measures for each of the nine evidence-based guidelines from the project that had an evidence-base as a potential quality metric. Each were categorized, differentiated the type of metric (process vs. outcome vs. structural), and defined the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) quality domain(s) that applied for each metric.

Resources in this section come from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The IHI's goal is to build practical improvement capability based on the science of improvement into every organization, health care executive, and professional, while driving innovation to dramatically improve performance at all levels of the health care system.

Created by the National Association of State EMS Officials as a deliverable for their EBG for Prehospital Pain Management project (funded by the NHTSA Office of EMS), document includes performance measures for evaluating adherence to the evidence-based guideline for prehospital pain management.

This measure is intended to assist EMS professionals in enhancing quality of care. The Measure is not a clinical guideline and does not establish a standard of medical care and has not been tested for all potential applications. NEMSQA encourages testing and evaluation of its Measures.

The PEDS chart review tool is designed to capture adverse safety events in the prehospital care of children. It was created by the Childen's Safety Initiative–EMS research team based on hospital chart review methods, adapted for prehospital use.

The NEMSIS V3 Prehospital Pediatric Quality Measures Dashboard is the result of a collaboration between NHTSA and the HRSA EMSC Program. It provides a summary of EMS data related to pediatric care. The dashboard can be used to support quality and performance improvement and complements the work of the PPRP. The quality measures in the dashboard consist of pediatric-specific views of performance measures maintained by the National EMS Quality Alliance (NEMSQA) as well as additional measures selected by a multidisciplinary panel. While the national data is available to the public, a state login is required to access the state-specific version of the dashboard. 

The NEMSIS V3 Prehospital Pediatric Quality Measures Dashboard gives the public a way to track the quality measures over time and across various EMS agency and incident attributes.