Hi, welcome to the Regional Time-Sensitive Care Coalitions course presented by the American College of Cardiology. I'm Mick Gunderson. Here in lesson four, we'll be discussing how to make a preliminary assessment of your catchment area. As always, if any questions come to mind or if there's any feedback you'd like to share regarding the course or the toolkit, please contact us at ncdrmail at acc.org. We look forward to hearing from you. To recap what we've covered so far, the first lesson talked about the advantages of well-designed and high-functioning systems of care for time-sensitive conditions and how that can be supported by establishing a Regional Time-Sensitive Care Coalition, or RETSCO. In the second lesson, we talked about the roles and responsibilities of the RETSCO and the RETSCO manager. In lesson three, we talked about how to define the catchment area and which organizations to consider inviting to participate in the RETSCO. Now here in lesson four, we're going to consider how to make a preliminary assessment of where things currently stand regarding time-sensitive systems of care efforts in the catchment area. The champion or group of champions advocating for establishing the RETSCO should attempt to catalog any systems of care initiatives, past or present, for a broad range of time-sensitive conditions. This information will be important to have when stakeholders are invited to attend the meeting to consider forming a RETSCO. The kinds of conditions to consider in this assessment might include things like major trauma out of hospital cardiac arrest, acute myocardial infarction, stroke, sepsis, major pulmonary embolism, and opiate overdoses. These initiatives, if any, may have been undertaken by a group of provider organizations, by individual tertiary hospitals working with just their referral hospitals and the ambulance services that bring them patients, maybe by a public health department, or even by an EMS provider agency or regulatory agency. So for each of the time-sensitive conditions, make a list of any programs that are currently in place, who the contact person or persons are for that group, and which organizations are participating. If there are any systems of care efforts that were previously taking place but have been discontinued for whatever reason, it would be good to make note of those as well, along with the names of those who are leading those efforts, and ideally some information on why the group is no longer active. For the groups that are currently active, try to find out if any data is available on how well those systems of care are currently performing, regardless of what level the information exists at. For example, some hospitals may have information on how well their particular hospital's systems of care efforts are working by combining their data with the data of the EMS agencies to bring them patients. And this is commonly done in clinical registry programs for trauma, STEMI, and stroke, where hospital and EMS data elements are both collected and then used to generate system-level process metrics related to things like the onset to intervention time interval. Such registries may be able to report on regional performance levels as well as the performance levels of individual hospitals. Now the champions setting up the RETSCO may not be able to get access to all of these reports, but they may be able to determine whether or not such reports are being created and who has access to them. So that's it for Lesson 4. It was short, but addressed an important step on the path towards creating a RETSCO and finally conducting quality improvement projects across multiple time-sensitive conditions at a systems level. In Lesson 5, we're going to talk about setting things up for that initial stakeholder meeting to consider formation of the RETSCO. Please send questions or comments to ncdrmail at acc.org, and I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.

catchment area

time-sensitive conditions

systems of care initiatives

organizations

initial stakeholder meeting