EMS Professionals Deserve Recognition and Thanks

Littleton, Colorado (PRWEB) May 20, 2009

SERIO Physician Management salutes all emergency medical services (EMS) professionals during EMS Week, May 17-23. We value your partnership with communities for public health and safety and your partnership with our emergency physicians toward excellent patient outcomes.

SERIO also salutes the physicians who work with EMS, providing education, training, quality improvement, quality assurance, research and resource support, plus medical direction, in addition to their clinical work in emergency medicine.

One such physician, of whom SERIO is very proud, is John Riccio, MD, FACEP, of the Emergency Physicians at Porter Hospitals (EPPH) physician group. He has worked on the Porter, Littleton, and Parker Adventists Hospitals' EMS Team since its inception 19 years ago, and is its medical director. He is also a founding member, along with SERIO's Dr. Pete Vellman, of the Denver Metro EMS Medical Directors Group. This group of EMS medical directors came together to develop the first unified, metro-wide protocols standardizing and simplifying prehospital care for our region.

Recently, Dr. Riccio spoke with SERIO concerning EMS Week and EMS professionals. "I honor their dedication, professionalism and hard work," he said "Every day of the year, 24/7, EMS professionals provide quality prehospital care to patients, no matter what the conditions. They are highly skilled people providing advanced medical care often in difficult settings." Dr. Riccio added that the link between EMS professionals and emergency departments is very important and that it leads to better quality of community health, patient care, and health outcomes, something emergency physicians are in a unique position to understand and evaluate.

Dr. Riccio said that the handoff from EMS personnel to EDs is something that the Porter, Littleton, Parker Adventist Hospitals' EMS Team and EPPH think is very important. "The importance our EDs have placed on this is something that has really strengthened the relationship between ED physicians and EMS partners.The fact that we make sure that doctors are there taking handoffs from EMS shows how much we value what EMS does in the field," he said.

When asked what some notable innovations and improvements in this partnership have been over almost two decades, Dr. Riccio said that the biggest change has been the successful integration of the care from the field with the care in the ED and on to inpatient hospital care. For example, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), once used only in the hospital, has been very successfully deployed for prehospital treatment of respiratory distress. This new EMS therapy has decreased the need for patient intubations and the associated complications and mandatory ICU admission. Other new exciting EMS modalities include therapeutic induced hypothermia after cardiac arrest to improve neurological outcomes and a sepsis alert pilot study, which takes aggressive resuscitative hospital care and delivers it sooner to the critical patient in the field.

In the view of Dr. Riccio, the future of EMS and the partnership of EMS with EDs and hospitals, lies in our ability to demonstrate with studies and data what benefit prehospital care affords patient outcome. "We can no longer assume, but need to demonstrate, how significant our input and care is to the continued well being of our communities," he said.

In conclusion, he added, "I'm proud of the quality of people, both in our department and the many EMS agencies we serve. It's an honor for me to work with people of that level of talent and expertise. And, their dedication to quality care and better patient outcomes, the unifying theme, is inspiring."

SERIO Physician Management specializes in providing a full menu of management services to hospital-based physician groups, including risk management, compliance, human resources administration, benefits administration, finance, and more. Visit us on the web at seriollc.com.

http://www.seriollc.com

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