Whitepaper: Today's Biggest EMS Challenges and How to Fix Them

Prior to the late 1960s, emergency medical service (EMS) in the United States didn’t exist—at least not in the manner that it is provided today. Ambulances were used to transport patients to hospitals or other healthcare facilities—and not much else. In 1960, only six states had standard education programs for rescue personnel—paramedics and emergency medical technicians didn’t come into being until the early 1970s—and only four states regulated ambulance-design specifications. By 1965, the vast majority of emergency medical services from coast to coast largely were unregulated.[1]

Operational Change Management Depends Largely on Organizational Culture

by Michele Frankovich and Elizabeth Lenz 

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus stated that change is the only constant in life. But that isn’t quite right. Another constant is that people generally are reticent to change and will do almost anything to avoid it. That’s because change represents the unknown, which is scary.

Nevertheless, change presents opportunities. Change is how people and organizations evolve. And evolution is necessary—if people and organizations do not adapt to changing conditions, they sooner or later will encounter difficulties. For instance, people need to learn new skillsets if they want to remain competitive in the job market. Similarly, organizations need to react to changing market conditions if they want to continue serving their customers, whose needs and wants continually evolve—or in the case of government entities, their constituents.

Life at MCP: Meet Joe Wheeler, VP of Justice and Courts

Over the last two years, Mission Critical Partners has grown significantly through acquisition, starting with Athena Advanced Networks in 2018, and continuing with Black & Veatch Public Safety and URL Integration last year. Last month, MCP announced its latest acquisition, Seattle-based MTG Management Consultants. The subject-matter experts who are joining MCP will enable us to better serve clients in the public-safety and justice communities by helping them enhance data integration and address their technology challenges.

Crisis Communications Planning for Mission Critical Agencies: The Basics

Public safety and other critical-infrastructure agencies responsible for providing mission-critical and lifesaving services to their communities must be able to do so under any circumstances. To ensure that they are able to maintain operations, agencies develop continuity-of-operations (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans to help mitigate the impact of a crisis. What these plans often forget, however, is how an agency will communicate with its stakeholders, both internal and external, during a crisis.

Missed Opportunities: Improving EMS Billing

As we have previously discussed, emergency medical services (EMS) agencies are undergoing a seismic shift in the way they operate. While many of these changes can be directly attributed to the current landscape resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, some challenges facing agencies today are not new. One such challenge concerns the billing and reimbursement process.