Before the survey opens – 1st week of January – it is headed by Program Managers updating and verifying the prehospital agency contact information listed in CLMS. The EDC helps Managers with this part of the process by creating state/territory-specific data quality reports of this information which show the data quality issues. Data quality issues can include missing contact information and/or information being in all capital letters or all lower-case letters.

Once the survey opens, prehospital agencies have three months to complete the 6-minute survey. Once a survey has been completed for an agency, their name is greyed out and becomes inactive on the survey website to decrease duplication of effort. Managers can monitor respondent and non-respondent prehospital agencies in the EDC’s secure Tableau dashboards.

The survey closes at the end of the third month. The weeks following the close, EDC staff export the estimated 8,000+ responses. EDC staff then spend 1.5-2 months cleaning the data so they can analyze it for national and state/territory results. Cleaning and analysis also include the preparation of the performance measure results in a report to HRSA and of addresses in proper form for geographic analysis into urbanicity levels. Approximately 3 months after the survey has closed EDC staff have created secure Tableau dashboards which they make available to Managers after HRSA approves release.

The three months following the Tableau dashboards are dominated by Managers sharing their results and educating prehospital agencies to produce improvement in the areas of pediatric emergency care coordination and skill-checking on pediatric equipment. During this period, EDC staff create a 3-page aggregate national report they email to all 15,000+ prehospital agencies listed in CLMS. You can view previous year’s national reports on our website.