1st Fridays with FirstPass
With COVID-19 shutting down most of our live, in-person opportunities to connect with all of you, we’ve decided to run a series of monthly webinars just for our FirstPass users. The goal is to provide a little bit of education, stay connected with everyone, build our community collaboration, and learn about things we can do to improve FirstPass. These sessions will be relaxed and interactive conversations with like-minded folks.
Please join Silvia Verdugo, MD, MPH, EMT-P, Mike Taigman, the rest of our FirstPass team, and your colleagues from across the U.S. and Canada. If you’re unable to join live, the recordings will be available on our website.
First Friday of Every Month | 8:30am PT / 11:30am ET
Upcoming Series Dates and Descriptions:
Past Dates and Descriptions (Recording Available):
November 6th (Combined with Conversations That Matter)
NEMSQA Guidelines: During this session we will explore the NEMSQA guideline framework and how FirstWatch and FirstPass can be set up to display them. Our guest for this session will be Michael Redlener, MD, President of the National EMS Quality Alliance, EMS Medical Director and Attending Physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Click here to view recording on Prodigy.
October 2nd
Reports: One of the most valuable components of the FirstPass system is reports. Our standard reporting package has undergone a major upgrade, based on your feedback. During this session you’ll learn about the cool things you can do with reports, and you’ll be able to influence the next round of upgrades.
Click here to view recording on Prodigy.
September 4th
FirstPass New Features: The FirstPass team and our engineers are constantly working in the background making improvements and developing new features, based on your feedback and requests. During this session you’ll learn what we’ve recently built for you and have the opportunity to influence the next round of upgrades.
Click here to view recording on Prodigy.
August 7th
Patient-Centric View: Unfortunately, most EMS quality improvement systems are still focused on providers rather than patients. During this session we will discuss how FirstPass takes a cutting edge patient-centric approach that some EMS systems are using to truly put the patient at the center of their system design.
Click here to view recording on Prodigy.
July 3rd
Resuscitation Improvement: Improving resuscitation from cardiac arrest is something almost every EMS system in the world has tackled at one time or another. For this session we will be joined by our colleagues David Lacombe and John Todaro, from Resuscitation Quality Improvement Partners, who will share the latest strategies for improving resuscitation.
Click here to view recording on Prodigy.
About the Presenters:
Silvia Verdugo, MD, MPH, Medical Director, FirstWatch, has earned an MD degree from Mexico and an MPH degree from a joint program from UCSD and the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, Mexico. Silvia has been awarded 3 postdoctoral research fellowships at UCSD where she conducted studies on Opioid Overdose, Substance Use and HIV Prevention. Before her transition into FirstWatch she worked for UCSD on a 5-year research program on an Overdose Intervention Program within deputies from a Sheriff’s Department in California. Silvia currently works within Clinical Team at FirstWatch and oversees all things FirstPass related.
Mike Taigman, MA, has more than four decades of experience in EMS and is one of the profession’s leading experts on performance improvement. An Improvement Guide for FirstWatch, Mike studies neuroscience based approaches to stress management and building resilience. He’s the author of Super-Charge Your Stress Management in the Age of COVID-19.
Hosted by Prodigy EMS
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10 Years of Evolution
A word from our Improvement Guide
Almost every EMS system has something with the word quality in it: a quality plan, a peer review QI committee or a quality improvement manager. Yet when you ask EMS leaders what their quality program has made better, shoulders shrug and the subject changes. Somewhere along our path we seem to have forgotten the improvement part of quality improvement. So how do we put the missing ‘I’ back into Quality Improvement?
Improvement success comes from making the Model for Improvement a regular part of the EMS organization, and it comes from effectively measuring your efforts. In these EMS organizations, the principles and practices associated with the science of improvement have been integrated into their DNA. They monitor their performance data in all vital areas of their operations, so they are able to spot problems before they get out of control.
There is no one right process or theory for how to do this, but we must expose and train our employees to these ideas in order to make improvement thinking automatic. We cannot simply say “we will now be a performance improvement oriented organization.”
At FirstWatch it is our goal to help provide you with the tools to help your organization and employees become successful, improvement oriented systems, and to also help you understand how our FirstWatch real-time, quality improvement tools can fit into your organization’s overall Quality Improvement program. The next time someone asks you those “What have you improved lately” questions, you can answer with confidence, and data! – Mike Taigman, FirstWatch Improvement Guide
