Steve A. McCoy has held a variety of positions throughout his EMS career that have given him the opportunity to build relationships with a variety of EMS stakeholders, so it was a natural progression to bring them all together. When he became the Emergency Medical Services Administrator for the Florida Bureau of Emergency Medical Oversight, he found EMS groups weren’t interacting with each other, operating in silos and not assisting each other during times of distress.
During Hurricane Irma, McCoy brought together several Florida ambulance associations during the state of emergency to build a state and federal force of more than 300 ambulances to move patients from harm’s way. Those associations played a key role, and were such a great benefit to the response, he included them in emergency planning meetings and had them written into emergency plans.
McCoy also revamped quarterly EMS Advisory Council meetings with stakeholders from fire-based, non-profit, and private providers to give them a better opportunity to interact face-to-face and build relationships. He noted these meetings allowed them to witness that the bureau treated all agencies equally across the board and all agencies are valuable to the process of delivering EMS in Florida. McCoy said Florida is a big state, but with these measures, EMS is a small community.
“We’re here to help everybody, it doesn’t matter what patch you wear or color ambulance you drive,” he said.
McCoy’s background in data gives him a different viewpoint and approach to EMS regulation than others. He believes in performance-based regulation and will utilize their state ePCR system to view agencies provision of patient care; if there are no complaints and good patient care is evident, he allows them to keep doing what they are doing to take care of their citizens. This allows him to focus on the small percentage of EMS agencies that are not doing as well with the overall focus of patients receiving the best possible care.
He believes performance based regulation changes the culture of EMS to focus on excellence in patient care. Florida has a group of 11 measures with data collection on outcomes that both the bureau and agencies have access to and can view their performance aggregated to the county level. McCoy and the bureau are currently in the process of defining future performance and new performance standards with the help of the National EMS Quality Alliance.
When looking to the future of EMS, McCoy predicts technology is going to shift EMS and patient care faster than currently expected. He says data is going to drive our care and our response daily. Utilization of evidence-based medicine will increase along with the integration of the variety of technology we currently see in the field to move EMS care from an event-centered approach to a patient centered approach.
