Mission templates for community paramedicine and mobile integrated healthcare

Community paramedicine programs are asked to do dozens of different things by dozens of different referrers, and almost none of those requests arrive in a comparable shape. One hospital sends a fax. Another calls the station. A payer sends a spreadsheet of members and asks the program to work out the rest. The clinical work is not the hard part; the coordination around it is.

A mission template fixes the shape of the request. It names who may raise it and on what trigger, the window the visit has to land inside, the skills the crew needs, the steps to work, the outcome fields the sponsor gets back, the escalation rule when the patient is worse than expected, and the logistics child orders that can be raised from the same mission, equipment, home health, pharmacy or mobility. Because the shape is fixed, two hundred missions across nine programs can be reported as one cohort rather than nine sets of notes.

The catalog is grouped into seven sections, A through G. Section A is post-acute transitional care and is where most programs start, because the referrer already exists (hospital case management) and the outcome the sponsor cares about is already measured. Section B is chronic disease and frequent ED users, which is population health work with a recurring cadence rather than a single visit. Section C is treat-in-place and alternate destination. Section D is ordered clinical work in the home: specimens, tracings, injections and dressings. Section E covers maternal and child missions. Section F is palliative, hospice and serious illness. Section G is the non-clinical half of the job, screening, navigation, telehealth facilitation and equipment.

Templates are labelled by phase. Phase 1 templates are the ones we recommend standing up first: they use skills nearly every program already has, they do not depend on a state scope-of-practice determination, and they map cleanly to a sponsor who is already paying for the outcome. Phase 2 templates need one more thing in place, a hospital-at-home programme, a tele-medical control agreement, a monitoring vendor, or confirmation from the state EMS office. Phase 3 templates are catalogued so programs can plan for them, and are enabled case by case.

Some templates are marked scope-dependent. What a community paramedic may do in the home varies by state and by the program's medical director: an IV antibiotic dose, a long-acting injectable, a catheter change or a point-of-care blood draw may be routine in one state and out of scope in the next. Those templates appear on state pages as items to confirm with the state EMS office rather than as capabilities we assert on your behalf.

One boundary is worth stating plainly, because it comes up in every procurement conversation. DispatchCare does not receive 911 calls and is not a computer-aided dispatch system. Emergency requests stay in CAD. Every template in this catalog is scheduled, referred or facility-initiated, and the escalation path for a patient who turns out to be sicker than expected is the ordinary one: online medical control, or 911 through normal channels, flagged on the mission so the referrer knows.

Filter by the sponsor persona who typically raises the mission, or read the sections in order. Templates with a page link go into the detail: clinical rationale, the full template, what the sponsor sees, what the program does, what you can measure, and how it maps to the CMS strategic goals behind Rural Health Transformation funding.

Each template lists the CMS strategic goals it supports, so a state office or a subrecipient can show which funded activity a mission belongs to. DispatchCare is a technology vendor and does not administer Rural Health Transformation funds.