Reno – REMSA has been awarded the American Heart Association’s Mission: Lifeline EMS Silver Award for implementing quality improvement measures for the treatment of patients who experience heart attacks.
REMSA is the first emergency medical services provider in northern Nevada and the only private EMS provider in the state to achieve this award. The Mission: Lifeline Silver Award is the highest designation that can be awarded for an organization’s first submission to the American Heart Association. The next level of achievement, a Gold Award, can be earned only on a second or subsequent submission.
“This award recognizes the outstanding clinical work of our paramedics and EMTs, as well as the administrative tracking and reporting by our continuous quality improvement staff,” said Diane Rolfs, Director of Education and Continuous Quality Improvement, REMSA. “Exceeding the reporting standards and showing outcomes at this level means that our community is getting the highest level of heart attack care available.”
The requirements to achieve the Silver Award were 75 % compliance in the following core measures. REMSA’s compliance exceeded that standard in both core measures:
>>94.7% of patients with non-traumatic chest pain, 35 years of age or older, received a pre-hospital 12-Lead ECG
>>92.2% of STEMI patients treated and transported to a STEMI receiving facility had a total time from first medical contact to device of less than or equal to 90 minutes.
Every year, more than 250,000 people experience a STEMI (a Myocardial Infarction or a heart attack that shows ST elevation on the ECG). Healthcare providers have worked to educate the public to recognize the first signs of a heart attack and to quickly call 9-1-1. Nationally, hospitals have worked diligently on internal procedures to reduce door to balloon (treatment) time and measure those times because it has been proven that time is muscle – meaning that the longer the heart is deprived of blood flow and oxygen, the more muscle damage or loss it experiences. Until Mission: Lifeline, there have been no national core measures for the time spent getting the patient to the emergency room door by EMS. These measures now set national benchmarks for EMS which will drive better patient care and improve outcomes.
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