83H - Creating a Unified Communications Center to Optimize Pre-Hospital Arrivals to Emergency Departments in a Large Multi-Hospital Health System

Wednesday, March 22

10:45–11:45 a.m.

Managing arrivals of EMS/pre-hospital patients can be challenging for any hospital or health system. These patients don’t make appointments and arrive only when injuries or illness occurs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this became even more pronounced in overwhelmed healthcare systems. Wait times and boarding became the norm across the country.

This session will cover how the creation of a unified communications center helped manage and distribute pre-hospital patients to a large multihospital system. Presenters will provide a method of creation of a UCC; allow for case discussion where individualized protocols for each hospital leads to improved patient resource matching; discuss UCC design and staffing and how to collaborate and address concerns with leadership structures of multiple hospitals and EMS agencies; discuss how a UCC helps to increase bilateral communications between inbound EMS agencies and emergency departments; and how to utilize a UCC to manage flow of incoming pre-hospital patients based upon ED census/overwhelming status using clinical informatics tools. The use of case studies, decision algorithms, and clinical informatics tools will provide attendees with insight and take-home tools to create a UCC at their home institutions.

Learning Objectives

• How to design and structure a pre-hospital unified communications center.
• How to create multidisciplinary workflows/algorithms and use clinical informatics tools to direct patients efficiently to the most appropriate hospital for their care.