Article Highlights
- The problem: Managing policies and keeping staff informed about changes
- The solution: PowerPolicy, an EMS software and policy management system
- The benefits: Save time and money, support accountability, and grow reliable staff
The problem: Manual policy management processes
Your EMS agency relies upon dozens of healthcare policies and procedures to ensure consistent, efficient, and safe emergency medical services. Without these procedures, you couldn’t provide the highest standards of care possible. But if you’re relying on a manual process to update and distribute policies, your policies might not result in the outcomes you intend.
A manual policy management process is time-consuming, laborious, and introduces numerous opportunities for error. For example, every time you need to update a policy, you must find and replace all physical copies with the new version, then redistribute them to staff. This process takes your limited time away from other essential tasks and increases the likelihood that staff accidentally reference an outdated policy.
With no way to ensure that all agency staff are updated on all policies, you can’t be sure whether they are working from outdated documents or maintaining compliance with EMS policies. Using contradictory procedures or referring to out-of-date policies can lead to errors, incomplete information, and incorrect decisions in the field. If these oversights are significant enough, they impair the health services citizens receive and introduce liability and compliance risks to your agency.
The solution: EMS software
Your EMS agency can overcome these challenges by streamlining and automating policy management, updates, and reviews with PowerPolicy by PowerDMS. This EMS software solution provides one central repository to efficiently manage documentation and keep staff up-to-date on changes as soon as they occur.
PowerPolicy facilitates automated review cycles, ensuring your policies always stay up-to-date. When it’s time for someone in a workflow to review, update, or approve an EMS policy or procedure, the policy management system sends an automated alert. Your agency can also improve transparency and internal communication throughout this process by manually logging external review notes and using tools such as:
- Version control to track the complete history of document changes over time.
- Access control to set user permissions to ensure every staff member has the proper access levels to critical information.
- Automated notifications when you update a policy or procedure to alert staff to any activity requiring their attention, such as reviewing or approving tasks and document version releases. Individuals in your approval workflow receive automatic notifications when it’s their turn to review or edit an updated document. You can also set automatic email notifications for specific users, departments, or refined lists, including indicating the frequency and urgency level of alerts, and request electronic signature sign-off to verify staff have reviewed changes.
With PowerPolicy, EMS staff never worry about accidentally referring to an old policy again. This health EMS software ensures everyone’s always looking at the most up-to-date policies because it automatically archives old document versions. Since you can categorize and tag documents according to specific fields, current policies are also easily accessible with full-text search and Google searches. Staff can even bookmark important documents so they don’t lose track of them.
The benefits of digital document management
PowerPolicy frees up critical EMS resources that can be better used elsewhere. This EMS software saves you time and money by allowing you to update policies and procedures four times faster than you can with paper-based processes. Since this policy management software is entirely cloud-based, employees don't need to rely on physical documents, saving your agency $11,000 in paper and printing costs and even more in reduced labor.
Finally, PowerDMS's health EMS software makes it easy for staff to find the policies and procedures that guide emergency medical best practices. This improved accountability means that your EMS agency reduces liability and compliance risks, and ensures staff reliably provide high-quality services that keep citizens as safe and healthy as possible.
Learn more
Book a demo today to learn more about how PowerDMS’s PowerPolicy can streamline policy management at your EMS agency.