Fitch & Associates
Bringing Exceptional Value to Emergency Services

As emergency services are the social and medical safety net for any community, it is incredibly important that they perform effectively and efficiently. This is particularly the need of the hour as emergency services, in the wake of the pandemic, are bogged down by challenges around lack of budget or monetary compensation and are facing a great exodus of personnel. Limited and short-lived resources disrupt their overall functions, efficiencies, and effectiveness. For example, in the case of emergency medical services (EMS), personnel are primarily reimbursed based on their ambulance transportation services. However, when the pandemic hit the world, healthcare facilities witnessed a 60.4% reduction in overall visits of patients suffering from less acute medical conditions. This lowered the revenue of ambulance services, ultimately resulting in employee attrition. The same rings true for fire and police departments, as these institutions are funded by the U.S. government’s budget to their municipalities.

Enter Fitch & Associates an emergency services consultancy that helps organizations or municipalities improve the quality of their emergency services, strengthen financial structures, and reduce response times. “Our team comprises consultants and partners who are experts in specific emergency services, be it medical, fire, police, or dispatch. They right-size our clients’ departments, adjust expectations, and ensure the safety of people within their community and the personnel cost-effectively,” says Guillermo Fuentes, COO of Fitch & Associates.

For four decades and counting, Fitch & Associates have remained an industry-leading consultancy. The company houses experts specialized in GIS, Operational research, and IT. Fitch has experienced, front end personnel that interact with the employees emergency services organization in-person to understand their issues. With the help of proprietary technologies, the team pulls backend data from 50 to 60 computer-aided dispatch systems electronic patient care records, hospital records and all the national data basis and Fitch’s own proprietary data base of over 1500 consultancies and simultaneously, reorganizes them in a usable format, and collates that information to test emergency simulations or theories. Based on that data and employee feedback, the company provides highly-implementable strategies and recommendations to help enhance efficiency and effectiveness in emergency services.

Fitch & Associates has a specialized brand MedServ dedicated to hospitals, dispatch centers and EMS where its management teams offer onsite management services on an interim or a long-term basis for several programs. Furthermore, the company runs numerous educational programs to reshape the future of emergency services. It provides various courses, such as Pinnacle EMS Leadership Forum, Ambulance Service Manager (ASM) Program, Communication Center Manager (CCM) Program, Beyond the Street (BTS) Workshop, and so on. The firm also provides expert analysis of revenue cycle management processes and performs Medicare and Medicaid compliance audits of both in house and outsourced EMS billing contractors. Last but not least, Fitch & Associates helps companies design effective dispatch centers based on their staffing, space, ergonomics, application codes, and other significant parameters.

Fuentes recalls an interesting case study where Fitch & Associates was called in to resolve the structural disparities present in the contract between the Canadian province, Nova Scotia, and their ambulance service provider. With the help of this provider’s ambulance program, the province covers an entire area of over 800,000 square miles. But due to existing disparities, the provider could not meet their objectives, leading to a significant emergency service disruption. To resolve the issue, Fitch & Associates interviewed the union and the employees of both parties and extracted data from their computer-aided dispatch systems, telephone systems, and other touchpoints. They created an environment to run what-if scenarios and theoretically test the solutions to said challenges using the data. Fitch & Associates also leveraged their marginal utility model to determine every asset’s marginal contribution and reallocated them to reduce other risks. “We increased the stay-at-home indicators and revamped and diversified the ambulance destinations to reduce hospital transports by 20%. The revised destinations allowed ambulances to be redirected to other medical facilities like clinics and other non-hospital entities. This, in turn, controlled the patient flow within hospitals and opened the door to fast medical care during emergencies,” explains Fuentes. In a nutshell, Fitch & Associates delivered transformative changes that optimized the client’s contract issues, increased overall efficiency, and revamped the entire ambulance program of Nova Scotia.

Priding over such success stories, Fitch & Associates is continually advancing themselves with leading technologies and human intelligence to deliver outstanding services. Moving ahead, the company is looking forward to assisting organizations and municipalities in evolving emergency responses to the growing mental health and social justice concerns, which are certainly the latest predicaments brought in by the COVID-19 environment. “Even in the next year, we can expect to be dominated by the pandemic. As a result, it is important to find ways to sustain our communities by scaling respective emergency services. We strive to stick with our clients through the trying times and help them navigate the new normal effectively,” concludes Fuentes.