Welcome to Lesson 3 in the Regional Time-Sensitive Care Coalition's course. While watching this video, if any questions come to mind or if there is any feedback you'd like to share regarding the course or the toolkit, please contact us at ncdrmail at acc.org and it will get routed to the right people to get you answers and hear your feedback. In the first lesson, we talked about the advantages of well-designed and high-functioning systems of care for time-sensitive conditions. We introduced the idea of a Regional Time-Sensitive Care Coalition, or RETSCO, to help address these problems through an organizational structure that includes stakeholders from across the continuum of care for multiple time-sensitive conditions and across an entire geographic region. In the second lesson, we talked about the roles and responsibilities of the RETSCO and the RETSCO manager. In this third lesson, we're going to talk about the catchment area of the RETSCO. This is really important because it will have a huge impact on who the stakeholders are that should be invited to join the RETSCO. Determining the catchment area for the proposed RETSCO is an important early step for the champion behind establishing the RETSCO. The catchment area could be the geographic area within a single municipality, like a city or county, a group of contiguous municipalities, or an entire region or even an entire state. Ideally, the catchment area should be a reflection of actual referral patterns between referral and tertiary hospitals with consideration of the associated jurisdictional areas of the 911 communication centers, non-transport medical first response agencies, and ambulance services that interact with the referral and tertiary hospitals. Consideration should also be given to the service area of the long-term care facilities, rehab centers, and secondary prevention providers that work with the tertiary centers. At a minimum, a RETSCO would include a tertiary receiving hospital, a referral hospital, and at least one ambulance service that routinely responds to 911 calls and brings patients to one or both of those hospitals. In some smaller communities, that may be the bulk of the potential acute care phase participants in the RETSCO, but in most places, there will be a larger number of hospitals and EMS providers that operate in the same region. The whole point of the RETSCO is to engage as many of the hospitals, EMS agencies, and other providers as possible that serve the same general area. This helps define the catchment area and thereby allows care to be coordinated within it. A RETSCO is not about one hospital in a region with multiple hospitals in the same area trying to independently coordinate with the ambulance services that bring in patients. It's not just about hospitals and ambulance services. The other health care providers and stakeholder organizations involved in the continuum of care for time-sensitive conditions, from prevention, preparation, acute care, rehab, and into secondary prevention, should also be encouraged to participate. This brings in 911 communication centers, non-transport medical first response agencies, EMS regulatory agencies, EMS medical direction providers, hospital associations, rehab departments or facilities, secondary prevention providers, CMS-recognized CIOs, public health department payers, senior appointed or elected officials from units of local government, and patient representatives or their advocate. That wraps up Lesson 3. Please ask any questions you may have and make comments you may want to share by emailing them to ncdrmail at acc.org. In the next lesson, Lesson 4, we're going to talk about making a preliminary assessment of the time-sensitive systems of care in your catchment area.

Regional Time-Sensitive Care Coalition

catchment area

stakeholders

referral patterns

coordination of care