Data system gives EMS leaders real-time insight into 911 response

A new data system gives emergency medical services agencies a complete view of 911 responses to improve outcomes.

Dr. Catherine Counts of the University of Washington Department of Emergency Medicine partnered with Seattle’s Innovation & Performance Team and the Seattle Fire Department to build a pipeline that connects patient care records with dispatch data. The system provides leaders and clinicians with real-time insight into emergency response and highlights areas for improvement.

Before this pipeline, critical information about a patient’s condition and care, recorded by paramedics, was stored in a software system that was difficult to access. To solve this challenge, the Seattle Fire Department, Innovation & Performance Team and Counts built a solution together.

According to the Innovation & Performance Team, the data pipeline is a modern, automated tool that securely extracts, cleans and stores EMS data for advanced analysis. It brings together previously siloed emergency response and health records, making it easier to analyze the full system. The solution is now public to help other agencies facing similar challenges.

The data pipeline is already making a tangible difference in pre-hospital emergency care. For cardiac arrest research, it has cut months of data preparation down to weeks, allowing researchers and medical directors to focus on analyzing outcomes, identifying training gaps, evaluating new CPR techniques and implementing community programs faster. That faster analysis strengthens every link in the chain of survival and improves patient outcomes across the city.

The pipeline also is transforming the city’s response to the overdose crisis. Real-time access to reliable data allows public health officials to track trends as they emerge, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and target resources to neighborhoods that need them most.

Releasing the code as open-source software helps other agencies nationwide adopt the same approach, enabling communities across the country to make faster, smarter decisions and ultimately save more lives.

Read the full blog post from the Innovation & Performance team.