This summer we had the good fortune to start working with Emergent BioSolutions and have recently completed our first round of deliverables: an abstract accepted to the American Public Health Association (APHA) conference; and a paper on new methods to analyze National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) data submitted to a journal for publication and posted to the MedRxiv pre-press server.  We have two more research papers in the works, written in collaboration with Emergent BioSolutions researchers.

Our methods paper on analyzing NEMSIS data seeks to improve researcher’s ability to make inferences about patient-level events in the NEMSIS data.  The NEMSIS data is organized such that each row of data reflects an EMS response, not a patient per se.  So if, for instance, two EMS units respond to a single patient event, data about that patient is recorded in NEMSIS twice.  As a result, using the NEMSIS data to make inferences about patients, such as how many patients were administered a particular treatment as part of their pre-hospital care, is difficult. 

The paper presents a method for identifying duplicate (or more) records in the NEMSIS data generated from the treatment of a single patient by multiple EMS units.  Our analyses of EMS responses in NYC in 2024, found that there were 32,202 EMS responses to provide assistance to individuals injured in assaults, but we estimate that these responses represent 26,451 patients. We will be using this approach to record de-duplication to improve our research on neighborhood influences on pedestrian injuries, drug overdoses and violence.