Watching 911 calls helps ADHS track health trends
Last week in Arizona there were nearly 18,000 emergency calls to 911 reported through the Arizona Prehospital Information and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Registry System (AZ-PIERS). That included 1,271 calls about injuries related to falls, 567 for motor vehicle crashes, and 343 for cardiac arrest and strokes.
We keep track of those numbers not out of idle curiosity but because it helps us do our job of protecting public health in our state and improving Arizona’s EMS and trauma system.
To help others benefit from this information, the ADHS Bureau of EMS & Trauma System has launched a 911 Call Volume Dashboard.
The Bureau collects, analyzes, and reports on data from more than 160 participating EMS agencies through AZ-PIERS, Arizona’s pre-hospital data registry. This data helps us create quality improvement initiatives designed to enhance Arizona’s EMS and trauma system. It allows us to track and understand trends at the state or regional level, such as hands-only CPR and evidence-based treatments for cardiac arrests that have improved patient survival.
This month marks the 11th anniversary of AZ-PIERS.
The dashboard displays the number of calls to 911 each week sorted by region and incident type. We can look at the data by EMS region (Central, Northern, Southern, and Western) and view a summary of the call volume for five categories of interest: cardiac arrest, heart attack, stroke, falls, and motor vehicle crashes.
The data serves as an early indicator of emerging health threats. As public health’s data infrastructure has grown over the last decade, we now have the ability to transform real-time patient care reports into useful data that can support informed decisions and evidence-based programming.
The 911 Call Volume Dashboard allows us to use pre-hospital data to support improvement of system operations, patient care, and provider safety. Please join us in taking a moment to recognize our progress towards improving care for all Arizonans. Thank you to all the EMS agencies and frontline Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics who make the 911 Call Volume Dashboard possible by submitting data to AZ-PIERS.
