Annual EMSC Grantee Meeting

National EMSC Data Analysis Resource Center Update

June 20 – 22, 2006

MICHAEL ELY: Here we go. Isn’t that cute? Oh. That’s cute. Okay. Now, we’re all in the same page. This is the NEDARC update.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Let’s see you, Mike.

MICHAEL ELY: Yeah. Let’s see if I can do this with a straight face now. I know there are many new coordinators out here so for those of you who don’t know who NEDARC is, we are a data and technical resource center that supports the entire EMSC network along with of course the National Resource Center. We’re located in the University of Utah and specifically help states with data collection issues and other technical issues such as grant writing and program evaluation and that sort of thing.

Principal investigators Mike Dean who I know many of you know. I’m the project director. We have a number of folks who work for us. The field team who gets out and contacts states regularly. We have folks that have clinical and faculty expertise who help with a lot of the grant writing type of issues. We have a group of statisticians that help with data collection and analysis issues and some IT staff who help with them database design and development issues. But so we have several new staff as part of NEDARC. So, I want to take the time to embarrass them for just a second and show their pictures up there.

This is Heather Van Duker who is our primary NEDARC statistician. Heather is actually been working with NEDARC for sometime and many of you know her. But she is our primary NEDARC statistician as the NEDARC contact for the southeastern regional EMSC states. And Heather’s been very great in helping us with some performance measure issues and has been a regular presenter at some of our workshops. Patty Schmuhl has been with NEDARC for a few months now and was hired as a web specialist and she’s done a fantastic job with the architecture of our new website, which I’ll show you some screenshots here in a bit. But Patty is the NEDARC contact for the care in Red River regions, as well as American Samoa, and Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands.

So -- and then our very brand newest NEDARC’s tech is Andrea Genovesi who is our education coordinator, which means she’ll be coordinating all of our workshop activities as well as advisory board planning activities. And she is the NEDARC contact for the Heck and Prep regions and some of the Irex states. So you might have seen some of these folks but reach out and give them a hug and welcome them to the EMSC world when you see them.

Just a brief update on some of the activities that NEDARC has been involved with over the past several months; performance measures, data workshop, site visits. And then I’ll show you a few screenshots from the new website. Performance measures, you may have heard of these. We’ve been very active in helping supporting Dan’s shop and working with Jane’s shop to help states understand the performance measures and how they can be best implemented in their states, and what they mean, and some of the data collection issues surrounding performance measures.

We’ve put together an FAQ list, which I think most of you have all seen. It’s been e-mailed out and will be available on websites and that document will be added to as we go and then we receive more questions from grantees about particulars of implementation in the states. So that will be a good resource for folks with performance measure implementation. We got a lot of material on our website, both our current website and the new website, which will be coming out shortly about performance measures. We held a couple of joint workshops with the NRC in last summer to help states writing their grants geared towards the performance measures and there’s some information on survey templates, which I’ll get to in a second.

And then just recently, in April, we held a survey workshop in Chapel Hill in North Carolina to help grantees and others understand issues around survey developments specifically with relation to the performance measures and those measures that have -- where our survey, it might could be use for gathering information. So, speaking of those measures, there are three of them that NEDARC has developed survey templates for we show this yesterday in the performance measure session, breakout session. But there are three measures where a survey tool could be used to gather to help grantees gather the information they need to actually address the measure. Those have to do with whether or not EMS providers have on and off-line medical direction on the scene of the emergency, whether ambulances are equipped with the pediatric equipment as recommended by AAP and ACEP and the degree of which hospitals have inter-facility transfer agreements allowing them to transport pediatric patients to other facilities with the -- who are able to treat them with higher levels of care. Those three survey templates were on our website. We encourage you to look at those, for those particular measures if you need some ideas on how to collect the information.

Workshops as you said, many of you know NECARC conducts workshop each year approximately three to four as part of our technical assistance. We did conduct the one in Chapel Hill on survey development and we got three more upcoming this year, which I’ll just go on briefly. The next is going to be a Scientific Grant Writing Workshop in August. This is actually we’ve held this workshop two or three or three or four years now. It has been very helpful. This is designed specifically for those folks in EMSC who are writing scientific grants, specifically for the outside funding sources. As you may know, there’s not a lot of money in the EMSC Program for research activity itself. So, we hold this workshop for EMSC researchers and others who are trying to secure money from other sources particularly NIH, which is sort of the format that we use in this workshop to go over -- there’s a lot of time for really for folks to write drafts of their projects, as specifically, there’s specifically aims and page and what it is they’re really trying to do with the grant and get the intensive feedback from faculty at the workshop. This has really been ideal for the folks in the PECARN network who are writing these types of grants.

So, we encourage you to take a look at -- all this information on the workshop is available on our website. I know that the hotel deadline for this one is July 24th. It’s about a month prior to the workshop. So, please take a look at the website if you’re interested in that. Second workshop, we’ll be offering will be on program evaluation in the EMS and in the EMSC in San Antonio in September. Of course, many of you were all under the sort of the expectation of being able to show the value of our programs and our projects and what it is we’re doing with the federal money that we get. So this workshop will be devoted to that, and to looking at different methods of how to evaluate programs and projects such as formative outcome impact and process evaluation. We’ll be talking about some budgeting issues with respect to program evaluation. There will be some time spent specifically; I’m talking about how performance measures might be used in evaluation measures. This will be ideal for EMSC coordinators and managers, EMS directors and those associated with the partnership grants.

So, we encourage you again to take a look at that and sign up for this workshop if you think that would be applicable. The last workshop this fiscal year, which is actually in a sort of grantee fiscal year will be in advanced data analysis in the EMS and the EMSC. We’ve held our workshop a number of times on EMS data analysis using Microsoft Excel and shown different methods of how data can be analyzed but we’ve gotten some feedback from that workshop to suggest that some folks would like to sort go to another level, a more sophisticated level of analysis. So this is really going to be for sort of an advanced analysis workshop. It will ideally be sort of a small group so there can be plenty of faculty time for the participants. But we’ll be using a data set and a particular software package for the analysis of some EMS data and they’ll be focusing a lot on things like confidence intervals, T-test, some different forms of regression.

So, this is not necessarily for those who are faint of heart with numbers. It will be good for those who have pretty good knowledge of statistics and hypothesis testing such as EMS data managers and other researchers. Anyway, all this information is on our website. There’s also information at the back and some handouts. Please take a look. Give us a call if you have any questions but all the information on how to register is right on our website.

Site visits. As you know, some folks know we do site visits every year, two states specifically, to help with EMS data development and collection issues because this has gained a lot of momentum over the years with the development of the NEMSIS technical assistance center which is also located at the University of Utah and the creation of the NHTSA 2.2.1 now, data set. And a lot of states are really moving forward with the development of their systems. So, we’ve gone out to about 15 states now and worked with them on developing a plan to migrate their current system over to a NEMISIS-compliant system and help them develop goals and objectives for moving the system forward and really developing some strategies for what they want to do and what they want to use their data set for. This is about a day and a half long site visit.

And we do it in conjunction now with the folks from the NEMSIS technical assistance center, which are Dr. Clay Mann and Mike Schnyder who was the project director for that. So, we encourage you again for folks who have a data system who want to take it to a new level or feel like things can be improved with that, we really encourage you to take a look at our website and call us. We’d be happy to come out and help you with that.

And last, here is some screenshots of our new website which will be live, hopefully, at first week or so of July. As I’ve said, Patty has been working hard on this and has just done a wonderful job. We’ve had a website for a number of years which has been helpful but we felt like it could be improved and so we took the time to really dive into it and to say, “What do we need to improve and how do we want to make it a little bit better?” So, there’s a number of things on the homepage here where you can go and have a start area. If you’re not sure where you want to go there’s a number of tabs across the top that show different areas that you might be interested in: collecting data, analyzing data, so forth. There’s going to be some sort of new hot topical areas over here; performance measures, information and that sort of thing. So, I’ll take you through a couple of screens up.

For here, for instance, one of the tabs is workshops and tutorials so you’ll be able to register directly on the website for workshops and get more information on each particular workshop. That again is also available on our current website but will be available on the new website as well. And then on each screen, as Jane was showing on their new website, there’s information over on the left -- I lost my laser -- about what’s on that screen and there’s a navigation bar up at the top that shows you where you’ve been coming from so in case you get lost. Here’s an example under the collecting data tab. We really wanted to make this a step-by-step process so it would be easier for someone to go through and you have an overview of that particular tab and then have steps that would take them through to help them with that particular area.

So there are a number of different areas on each tab that you’ll be able to step through. And then most of them also have some additional information specifically on that topic as to how it relates to the new EMSC performance measures. Again, grant writing is an area that you need help with quite a bit, so there’s a tab for that. A bunch of information on writing grants and tips for writing grants and the information of course on our grant-writing workshop would be under the workshop section. And finally, we’ve put together this resource library because on our old website we always had a lot of information and links to other pages that we wanted to show folks, but we thought it would be really good to have a centralized resource library.

So, this is available, which will have documents, publications, links to other websites which will also be available on other parts of the website but are centralized here under the resource library. So, for instance, if you go to articles and publications, there will be a whole drop-down list of a number of different articles and publications on different topical areas. And then there will also be information on the performance measures as we mentioned for those who don’t know a lot about it, there’s sort of a basic description of what the performance measures are. And then all the information, all the resources available such as the survey templates that we’ve developed, the guidance itself, the performance measure implementation manual will be on this sheet. So, I think that’s it. Thank you.