Niagara EMS reduces costs by 66%
Academic research paper focuses on program run by paramedics
The success Niagara Emergency Medical Services has had enhancing patient care, and saving a lot of money at the same time, is the focus of a new academic research paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Niagara EMS Deputy Chief Rick Ferron said the study — “Economic Analysis of Mobile Integrated Health Care Delivered by Emergency Medical Services Paramedic Teams” — was primarily developed by researchers from Mcmaster University, focusing on the use of mobile integrated health (MIH) teams in responding to calls for help in situations that are not life-threatening.
Through the MIH program, paramedics are teamed up with other health-care professionals to provide on-site urgent and non-urgent care to patients, as opposed to the traditional approach of transporting patients to hospital emergency departments.
“It was really interesting the way they did the research,” said Ferron.
“They compared the exact
same types of calls performed by the MIH teams versus the traditional approach with an ambulance. They did the economic analysis three or four different ways, but even the least optimistic of the methods that they used showed having these teams respond was about two-thirds cheaper.”
Despite that 66 per cent savings compared to delivering patients to hospital aboard an ambulance, Ferron said the program was launched to enhance patient care while hoping it wouldn’t increase costs.
“Anecdotally, we see significantly better care being delivered in these scenarios, but what we needed to validate was
that the whole approach was at least equivalent from a cost perspective and certainly not more expensive,” he said. “We didn’t want to be doing something that was providing additional cost to the system.”
Ferron said the next phase of research will focus on the outcomes of patients who were treated by MIH teams.
He said paramedics often hear from patients who have been assisted by the teams, “that this provides a much better level of care for those who receive it.”
“Having a paramedic and a mental-health nurse standing right there, or a paramedic and an occupational therapist or a paramedic that’s linked into a palliative-care network or the LHIN home-care service, that certainly seems to be providing something that people are looking for,” Ferron said. “If you can provide a better quality of care and it’s cheaper to do, you’ve hit all the sweet spots.”
Ferron said not every call paramedics respond to would be appropriate for an MIH team, “but it certainly says that, for the calls we do that are appropriate for this type of response, having a team such as this is significant cost savings to the health-care system.”
Ferron said he hopes the research will help paramedics organizations in other parts of North America develop similar initiatives, while also helping Niagara EMS expand its programs.
“We want to do what we’re doing not just for the benefit of us. We want to share that knowledge so it can be used anywhere,” he said.
“We also want to share this information with the Ministry of Health and those who make decisions so they have more viable information to say, ‘This makes sense; maybe we need to look at rolling this out across other parts of Ontario, as well.’”