Article Highlights
- The problem: Limited time and money for accreditation preparation
- The solution: Emergency medical services software
- The benefits: Save resources, demonstrate excellence, and ensure consistently high performance
The problem: Limited time and money for accreditation
Your EMS agency regularly receives compliments for its professionalism and outstanding emergency medical services. You want to formalize these accolades and publicly demonstrate your excellence by pursuing accreditation. But stakeholders keep asking, “is accreditation worth the expense and effort?” Staff worry they won’t have the time to collect all necessary documentation, hospitals wonder if the process will impact your service delivery, and the City Manager isn’t sure there’s sufficient budget for the undertaking.
Achieving accreditation can require a lot of time, money, and energy, particularly if you rely on a manual, paper-based process for document management. That’s because a paper-based process makes it challenging to ensure that all EMS policies and procedures are up-to-date with regulations. Without an efficient means to compare your policies to regulatory standards, you spend excessive time wading through standards manuals and looking for the physical policies strewn throughout your office.
Even after you ensure your policies align with standards, you lack a streamlined way to enforce EMS compliance across the agency. Unfortunately, employees who remain uninformed or non-compliant with EMS rules and regulations will provide inconsistent services that create safety risks for staff and citizens. This is not only bad for your community – it also jeopardizes your ability to attain accreditation.
The solution: Accreditation management software
You can streamline your accreditation process and demonstrate excellence with PowerStandards by PowerDMS. This emergency medical services software provides vital tools that reduce the time, money, and energy required to attain accreditation.
Standards mapping
Instead of searching for papers and manually comparing your policies to EMS rules and regulations, use PowerStandards to map your documentation to an accrediting body’s standards. All you have to do is upload your policies, procedures, and other proofs of compliance (like documents, videos, and images) to the software system, then link them to relevant standards.
PowerStandards sends an automated alert whenever an update to a standard may impact policies you linked, ensuring everything is always compliant. You can also use this accreditation management software to highlight and label the document to emphasize how it meets standards so the assessment process moves along as efficiently as possible.
Task management
PowerStandards’ task management features make it easy to manage all the tasks required to attain accreditation. You can assign specific standards to team members (e.g., EMS response time standards) so they can upload narratives and all necessary evidence of compliance. This includes the ability to set one-time or recurring tasks, which appear in an employee’s to-do list and PowerDMS inbox, to ensure accreditation is an ongoing process.
Self-assessments
After you collect all the necessary documentation, use PowerStandards to perform a mock assessment. Reviewers and visitors can leave comments or upload documentation to specific standards, which you can then view to make necessary changes or secure for your future reference. Visitors can also set a “met” or “not met” status on each standard and keep a record of your agency’s performance that can be exported for analysis and inclusion in the final visit report. Additionally, this accreditation management software provides dashboards you can use to track assessment progress, including viewing status reports broken down by standard.
The benefits of emergency medical services software
PowerStandards makes it easy to demonstrate excellence and achieve accreditation – all while showing stakeholders the process doesn’t have to be costly. This emergency medical services software pays for itself in the time and money you save throughout the accreditation process by:
- Streamlining the EMS accreditation process and performing self-assessments 50% faster.
- Saving an average of $11k on paper and printing costs.
- Reducing the staff labor required to ensure accreditation readiness.
By keeping all EMS policies and procedures up-to-date and maintaining compliance, your agency can ensure a consistently high performance from staff. As a result, EMS responders and citizens are safer in the field, and your agency can achieve accreditation and demonstrate excellence in the community.
Get started
Ready to showcase your commitment to excellence? Book a demo today to learn how PowerStandards can get your EMS agency accreditation-ready in no time.