Tracking illnesses among benefits of hospital-staffing firm
By Linda A. Johnson
Associated Press
LIVINGSTON, N.J. — To local and national health officials, Emergency Medical Associates is more than a staffing and billing company for ER doctors — it is a repository of information that can help prevent the spread of illness.
Don Murray • Associated Press
The company provides data on patient treatment patterns and outbreaks of diseases to health officials in a variety of government agencies, tipping them off to possible widespread health problems.
Dr. Chris Freer, director of Emergency Department Services at St. Barnabas Medical Center, right, examines Dr. Robert Modlinger while Modlinger's wife, April, looks on. The hospital's emergency department uses Emergency Medical Associates, which supplies ER doctors and handles billing. The company also helps to spot spikes in diseases or other illnesses and adjusts ER staffing accordingly.
Livingston-based EMA tracks virtually every aspect of roughly 750,000 patient visits at the 17 hospitals it staffs each year — how long it took patients to get through triage, see a doctor and be discharged or admitted, plus the symptoms they had, tests they got, diagnosis and treatments given.
The company routinely uses its data to find ways to get patients through emergency departments quicker, provide better care and cut waste. Doctors entering data as they treat each patient are prompted by EMA's software to consider specific tests or diagnoses. And EMA supervisors in each hospital can review data on every patient case to spot weaknesses in individual doctors and guide them in adjusting.
"We spend a lot of time making sure patients are happy with us," responding to every issue, said Jonathan Rothman, who directs data management at EMA and created its computer software and database.
But over the region it covers — central and northern New Jersey, New York City and its suburbs — EMA can use its data to spot spikes in specific illnesses and adjust ER staffing accordingly, and to detect unusual symptoms. That data, which EMA sends regularly to public health authorities, also could serve as an early warning system if bioterrorists struck.
While there haven't been any attacks, EMA data detected an outbreak of rotavirus, which causes infant diarrhea, and helped document "Bill Clinton syndrome," when middle-aged men surged into hospitals wanting their hearts checked after the former president had quadruple-bypass surgery on Labor Day, Rothman said.
Rothman started building his database in 1998, after EMA doctors at two hospitals mentioned a jump in the number of gastrointestinal disorders and he saw the value of having detailed patient data, updated daily.
The Sept. 11 attacks added urgency. EMA then began working with doctors in New York City and at the U.S. Department of Defense and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop national coding standards for 11 categories of disease, such as certain respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses, that could signal a possible bioterrorist attack, said Lt. Col. Julie Pavlin.
EMA has dozens of competitors across the country — from Jersey Emergency Medicine, a small group of physicians that serves only Community Medical Center in Toms River, N.J., to national leader Emcare, which has ER doctors in more than 300 hospitals in 37 states. Not all provide billing services or detailed data on operations and quality of care, Rothman said.
