How EMS-hospital interoperability improves operational efficiency and patient care

Emergency departments (EDs) across the country are facing unprecedented challenges. Visit numbers continue to rise — along with patient complexity — resulting in crowding and longer wait times.¹ As a result, hospitals struggle to manage not only patient care coordination, but capacity planning, surge monitoring and referral alignment. Having access to more complete emergency medical service (EMS) data, however, can strengthen care coordination, said Joe Graw, Chief Growth Officer at ImageTrend.

Facilitating near real-time data exchanges between EMS and the provider organization can prevent duplicate documentation. “You can avoid delays in care. And you can ensure that you are routing different emergencies through the ED, so each patient is getting the right care at the right time,” Graw added.

Sharing data, connecting systems

Hospitals and health systems can stand up practical EMS-hospital data exchanges supported by the appropriate roles, workflows and data exchange standards including HL7, FHIR and the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS). This kind of interoperability not only enables clinicians with critical patient insights while avoiding onerous and often duplicate documentation processes, but it also drives performance improvements. Graw said it’s possible to unlock many “interoperability opportunities across the care continuum” to develop specialty pathways and enhance care.

“When you can connect the systems to see the data from the EMS and the hospital side, you can start benchmarking,” he said. “What is the ED’s response time? How quickly did the patient get the treatment they needed? Did it have an impact on outcome?”

Integrating EMS data into hospital data systems on the registry side, Graw stated, gives clinical decision makers access to a complete picture of a patient’s journey. And that data, through shared metric definitions and faster abstraction, can help measure performance of clinicians and departments. It can also inform educational initiatives with the goal of offering better care to each patient and building value for the healthcare organization as a whole.

Optimizing operations

Data from real-world EMS transport patterns can also assist in making hospitals more efficient. By applying this type of market intelligence, hospitals can track ED traffic in close to real time, even during natural disasters, mass casualty events or opioid surges.

“The whole healthcare system can use this data to not only anticipate demand but optimize staffing and align referral networks,” he said. “It allows both EMS and hospitals to ensure they have the right resources in the right places at the right time, so they can care for the patients in their communities.”

Currently, Graw added, there are far too many data gaps that can hinder access and care. Those gaps have also hindered partnerships and information sharing across the care continuum, putting additional stress on EDs. But EMS-hospital interoperability empowers healthcare organizations to become much more proactive about planning.

“When we wrap our digital arms around ED patients and events, we have the data and insights we need to shape the highest-quality care for patients. This is an opportunity to connect information to transform healthcare delivery and improve the whole healthcare continuum,” said Graw.

Reference

1. Abir, M., Briscombe, B., Berdahl, C.T., et al. April 7, 2025. Strategies for sustaining emergency care in the United States. Rand Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2937-1.html.