Office of Emergency Medical Services

The Objective of the Medical Command Coder study was to assess the communication exchange between field personnel and medical command personnel, assess the effectiveness of the MISER acronym, as the ability to determine Priority I or Priority II status of the patient based on the information given, and to assess whether redundancy in the communication system would result in improved information exchange/coding.

Coders underwent two iterations of training in the MISER acronym and priority classification of trauma patients. Then, coders where randomly assigned to one of three conditions, C1=transcripts of the communication, C2 = audio of the communication, and C3 = both transcript and audio versions of the communication.  Each coder was provided the white-washed cases in four different batches at four different times throughout a two month period.  The coders used the coding sheet (see attached) designed to assess the degree to which the field personnel and medical command; a) addressed each of the MISER categories, b) were effective in the communication exchange, c) were appropriate in their communication exchange, and d) the overall quality or synchrony of the communication exchange.