
Session Details
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.
Presented By

Joshua D. Gray, MD
Associate Medical Director

Cassie Mueller, RN, PCCN, CNML, SANE-A, TCRN
Director, Emergency Services