FirstNet staff recently met with members of the Public Information and Community Relations & Injury Prevention team with Austin-Travis County EMS. Like their hometown of Austin, this EMS team is  known for its innovative use of technology.   

Not only does the team seek to provide outstanding medical care, but it has also earned two Emmys for public safety announcements (PSA), and a documentary film about the team is debuting at the Sundance Film Festival.

These aren’t the only things that make Austin-Travis County EMS unique. The team is a stand-alone division that covers over 1,100 miles, which includes the City of Austin, all of Travis County, and parts of neighboring counties. While each member of the team has different reasons for becoming a paramedic or getting involved in community outreach, they all share a strong commitment to public service and offering top quality medical care to the central Texas community.

YouTube: Shattered Dreams, Austin-Travis County EMS

Why did you join the Austin-Travis County EMS team, and what made you interested becoming a paramedic?

Captain Darren Noak:

This career seeks you out. I always had public safety in the back of my mind.  As a kid, I wanted to be a policeman, firefighter, or paramedic, then I went to Texas A&M and got a marketing degree.  After school, I ended up working in Houston in a totally unrelated field. It was fine, but it was just a job.

In my spare time, I started EMT training because I thought it would lead to a cool part time gig, and I ended up becoming very interested in it. I became a paramedic and moved to Austin. After working for a private ambulance service, I joined Austin-Travis County EMS and been here for 20+ years.

Captain Randy Chhabra:

For me, and probably most of the EMTs and paramedics I know, the foundation of the answer is “I don’t know, it’s just kind of in my DNA.”

I went to school, got my degree in genetics, and was going to go to medical school, but I became a paramedic as a resume builder and just found public service very fulfilling. It would be hard for me to do something else.

Community Services Program Manager Lisa Sepulveda:

My background is a little different, I’m not a paramedic or EMT, but when the opportunity came up to work here and help out, I jumped on it. Before joining Austin-Travis County EMS, I owned my own PR firm and I also worked for a big corporate entity. For me, there’s not the same satisfaction in working in a profit driven industry. The public isn’t always viewed in a favorable way. Instead of thinking about the needs of the people on the street, the bottom line is put first.

I had to walk away from that because it did not make me feel good.  I was recruited to come to Austin EMS, but I love it, and what’s kept me here is the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping. Even when I was in the corporate world, I spent a lot of time volunteering.  Helping people is something that’s always been important to me. This is a great place to work; you know you’re doing good because you can see it. The people I work with are the most compassionate folks I’ve ever met – they love every minute of it. It becomes part of their identity.

What are a few things that make Austin-Travis County EMS unique?

Captain Darren Noak:

EMS is the third arm in Austin. We are totally separate, and the focus is completely on medical services.  That helps us recruit from around the country. The majority of EMS systems are based around fire departments. Boston, Austin, I think Denver, and maybe a couple others are separate.  We get interest from EMTs and paramedics who are primarily interested in focusing on medical care, and we offer the highest level of medical care here because of that emphasis.

80% of emergency calls are medical, and the care we offer is top notch. We are with the patient all the way to the hospital – that’s pretty unusual.

We also put a lot of emphasis on special operations. Special operations medics provide medical care everywhere from the side of a cliff after a rock climbing incidents to hazmat situations.  Our focus on special teams allows patients in those situations get the same level of care as a patient we are saving at home on his or her couch. Austin has three all hazard units and a medic SWOT team – trained on weapons. With each of these teams however, the first priority is always patients – these EMTs are trained to get to the patients who need help. There are some really dedicated amazing people that we work with doing pretty cool things.

I’m in the Public Information Office (PIO), and one of the unique things about our team is that we all have specialty backgrounds in EMS so you come in with that hands on perspective and it’s really interesting to move to the PIO.

In this position now, I have the ability to tell the stories of everyone on the team. I like that I’m in a position to “toot our horn” and to tell the folks what we do.

Austin-Travis County EMS is doing a lot in terms of community outreach. What are some of the more unique or innovative ways you reach out?

Commander Mike Benavides:

There is a focus on interagency cooperation. What’s upstream that creates that cooperation is the City of Austin. The city sees their marketing and public information as an umbrella. We are separate and have autonomy but EMS, fire, police, parks and recreation - we all represent Austin. For example, we may want to do a car seat safety inspection in southeast Austin and there’s no community business where we can host it. We may coordinate with the Parks and Rec division and we both market the event. They have the location and we have the subject matter experts in their EMS uniforms, which lend more credence and credibility to these events. By offering services to everyone, even our partners – this enables solutions.

Community Services Program Manager Lisa Sepulveda:

We also focus these partnerships to help with the prevention side of community outreach. From a fall prevention program to hands-only CPR training to increase bystander participation. Austin-Travis County EMS provides all this for free to help prevent accidents – we’re here if you need us but we hope that you won’t need us. We also constantly try to come up with ways to utilize our partnerships, including nonprofits and hospital networks to target people in need.

There’s a lot of outreach to “hot spots” in Austin – low income, underserved communities or places that are not fully served by the community at large. For instance, we conduct car seat safety checks in areas where more tickets are given for unrestrained children. We’ve actually linked to ticketing data from the court system so our approach is very targeted, data driven marketing campaigns.

We also try to connect patients with organizations that can help them. Many non-profit organizations do great work but have limited reach and capacity. We’ll try and find out which organization could or should service these areas and partner in a way that’s not cumbersome but beneficial to them as well as us.

One specific problem we are trying to solve is how to help people who are basically depending on ambulances as their primary health care provider. Often times these people don’t have another option, but this presents a heavy burden on the taxpayers and on EMS emergency response.

One solution we’ve come up with is a community healthcare medic program where we do home visits. Medics check blood pressure, blood sugar, do a basic assessment and try to connect them to the services that can help them in an ongoing way.  We try to divert that pattern of dependency. While we’re there we also look around and try to note if there is an unsafe home environment that could lead to a fall, then folks from our fall prevention team will follow up and help them in that way.

Overall we try to listen to the people we serve to meet their needs, asking questions, identifying problems and being proactive about problem solving. We are very fortunate to have leadership here in Austin that shares that vision.  Fixing problems, not just seeing them – that’s how our injury prevention unit was built.

Can you tell us about some of the ways the Department uses broadband?

Captain Darren Noak:

From the PIO perspective communicating is the name of the game. We use social media like Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, and YouTube to provide information and messaging to the public. When working within our community we use safety messaging and active alerts to get information out to all our followers in a timely manner. This is especially critical when there are immediate dangers like flash flooding happening. These tools have also been helpful in providing status updates and information to people all over the world.  In addition to providing this type of information, apps like Periscope enables us to share academy graduations and news conferences in real time. Being connected is critical.  Whether we are in the office or out in the field, we have to be able to access information.

Commander Mike Benavides:

In addition to having smartphones and mifis (mobile hotspots); all our ambulances function as closed system mobile hotspots and have OMG (onBoard Mobile Gateway) wireless routers. Pretty much everything we do in terms of record keeping is electronic. We capture information on tablets and all the medics use those on calls, at community outreach events, and pretty much all the time. These tablets are crucial in communicating information to the hospitals, billing, and collecting data points, etc. They also help us stay on top of our paperwork - for instance run forms. All run forms are completed the day we offer assistance, everyone is able to see and get data from these run forms, and our electronic patient care records (EPCR) are generated within 48 hours. That’s really fast.

We are lucky to have access to great broadband here in Austin.  Occasionally we’ll hit a trouble spot, but we have pretty good connectivity across the county.  Austin-Travis County EMS has state of the art equipment – probably one of, if not the, best in the country.  As the technology has increased, we’ve upgraded, and we routinely build in redundancy to all our communications equipment.