MORGAN COUNTY - The Malta & McConnelsville Fire Department in Morgan County is on the cutting edge of technology with one of the most advanced initiatives in its 94-year history.
The M&M Fire Department in McConnelsville is using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze its own emergency calls and find patient and staff trends through its AQuA study.
"It stands for artificial quality assurance," noted M&M's Clinical Quality Officer Joshua Tilton. "My field of study is artificial intelligence. I've been a paramedic for around 22 years. I was active here for 15 of those years, and now I'm coming back as part of my PhD study."
M&M's AQuA compiles information from the total care reports of every run. "So it's time of day, day of week, weather can be a factor into some of the care. It's the care that was given," Tilton explained. "Then we get follow-up reporting from the hospitals that we transported to, so we know what the disposition was, and all of that feeds into the model."
The AI uses that information to create probabilities. "We take the raw data, and then we put it into unsupervised machine learning, which at that point starts to find correlations and patterns and strengths of correlation, and then give us predictions," Tilton noted. "Because it's unsupervised, there's no bias. The model itself builds the correlations and trains itself off of the data.
"The data is giving us correlations that we would never even think of, like we would never even think to look to see what the average age of a patient per unit is because, to us, it shouldn't really matter. But when we see things like that, it becomes actionable," he explained.
For example, some of M&M's medical teams are more likely to treat geriatric patients, while others are more likely to respond to chest pain calls. The AI hints that certain personnel combinations are more likely to respond to certain situations.
"It'll go clear down to the individual level. We can make it come up to the macro. We have department trends. We have unit-day trends. Then, we have clinician trends. We can use the artificial intelligence to predict how a clinician would treat a patient."
From that, M&M developed just in time training modules to bolster the team's strengths and curtail potential shortcomings. "Shore up their weaknesses before they become a weakness," Tilton stated.
"The whole study is how to use artificial intelligence to deliver just in time training to prevent sentinel events in medicine. So basically, take our clinicians who are already good and elevate them to be better. We've seen our clinical care standards come up significantly," he said.
Based on September 2024's data, the AI has changed how M&M responds to their runs. They've seen an increase in advanced life support (ALS) and a decrease in basic life support (BLS) in Morgan County.
AQuA is still in its infancy, but Tilton had more hopes for its future. "We could look at things like AI recognizing pictographs, so like EKGs. That's where I see the future going, but the key piece for that to even be possible is to prove that quality assurance can be driven by artificial intelligence."
The advent of AI in recent years has brought controversy and skepticism - even within M&M -- but early indications have supported improved patient care in Morgan County.
"I have always been against AI," said Jacob Woodward, captain of EMS operations. "Then, when Josh brought this to me and showed me what we could potentially do, that piqued my interest," he admitted.
"Our main goal here at M&M is to provide the right and best care to the patient the first time and every time," he continued.
"I have family here, but you here, as a visitor, deserve the same care as my family, so I want to make sure anyone traveling through the town is getting the best care possible. And with AI, we are seeing improvements. A lot of places didn't need improvement, but we're seeing improvements in places where we didn't even realize we needed to make improvements."