MCAs Report Writer Basics

welcome to this Michigan region 8 MCA training in the Michigan EMS data system today's topic is Report Writer basics Report Writer is the tool that imagetrend elite provides to run analytical or summary reports on the EMS data in the system here's our agenda for today we'll first just show how to access report writer then we'll find an existing predefined report that someone else is built and we'll run it then we'll play around with modifying that report making few changes to it finally we'll just create our own report from scratch and we'll wrap up with discussion of additional reports that may be useful for you to have as an MCA user in the imagetrend elite system in Michigan to access report writer we'll first need to log into the Michigan imagetrend elite system or my emesis if you go to my - MSS org slash elite that will get you to the login page if you'd like to follow along and get some practice today you can do that you can just log in using your own account I'm going to log in today with an account that have my account is little bit different than yours because I'm not an MCA user instead have access at the agency level to handful of agencies in region 8 once I've logged can find the Report Writer by going to the tools menu and then choosing report writer over on the far left side here's the report writer interface your interface will look just little bit different than mine you will not have the analytical tabular report or analytical chart report options however you will have these transactional report options and in few minutes we're going to create transactional report from scratch using one of these options but first let's look at reports that have already been created in the system by others and have been shared with everybody in the system over on the left-hand side is menu of folders that contain various reports that have been created the first section is called my reports any reports that you create and save will show up in the my reports section in the middle is the shared reports section and down at the bottom the imagetrend reports section these are reports that have been created by others and have been shared with you or shared with everybody in the system in particular I'll point out the QA Qi folder there are bunch of reports that I've created in the QA Qi folder that have been shared with everyone since am logged in as myself they actually show up in the my reports section for me but for you they'll be in the shared reports QA Qi folder click on that folder I'll see several different reports that have been created to cover various topics that may be of interest to you as an MCA we're going to get some practice just running reports I'm going to take look at the dispatch complaint report as hover over it can see that this report counts the number of PCRs by complaint reported by dispatch so it's pretty simple report that just tells me how many calls EMS has gone on for different types of dispatch complaints handy way that you can use to find reports on different topics is to use the search box up in the top if type in dispatch then it will filter the list of reports to those that have title with the word dispatch in it and here you can see the dispatch complete report as an option there to run report first I'll click on it this brings up the report in the main window here and this report has already been designed to ask you for some filter criteria it's gonna ask for unit notified date range so in other words an incident date range that you want to run the report on so you can fill in date range and click generate report and that would run it however have seen some significant performance issues in this system and have some potential workarounds for those issues found that if simply run this report with no filters at all it could take very long time to run like several minutes even though may only have access to handful of agencies or particular County or MCA may not have access to more than few hundred or few thousand records and yet it will take several minutes to run this report if don't apply any filter criteria have discovered that if can filter the report geographically upfront even though it really doesn't change what have access to it will cause the report to run more quickly so let's say for example have access to several agencies in region 8 if run the report with no filters at all it's going to limit the report results to only those agencies have access to that are all in region 8 and yet it's going to essentially read through every record in the entire state to figure out if have access to that record or not so can give it help or shortcut by telling it to only look for records in region 8 since know that's all it's going to get for me anyway so I'm going to add criteria to my report before even run it for the first time and again this is going to help us to improve how quickly the report runs I'm going to add region I'm adding it as filter so that means whenever run the report it'll ask me which region want to filter on I'm going to click generate report again and now in addition to date range it's also asking me for it renamed at agency level 2 but it's the region so can say region is equal to region 8 so that's all have access to anyway but by setting this filter upfront it causes the report to run more quickly I'm also going to set the date range to this year and when whittle down date range like that that also helps the report to run more quickly so the combination of these two filters is going to make it so that this report will take less than minute to run so with those applied I'll click generate report ok here are the results for my report so have as said access to handful of agencies in region 8 and this report is breaking those down by MCA and then listing the agencies within that MCA what type of service they provide and then it has the breakdown of dispatch complaints with how many patient care reports there have been for each one for example let's head down to Marquette MCA there are several agencies in Marquette MCA that have access to and it's listing in each of those agencies the different dispatch complaints and the number of calls they've gone on so for example in the Gani Township their most common dispatch complaint is an MVC or transportation incidents this can sometimes be used for quality improvement for example there is dispatch complaint called no other appropriate choice and you can look in the various agencies and make sure that that's not being used frequently you know every once in while that's gonna be what they'll have to pick but if that's the most common dispatch complaint that they're picking it could be that they're not really taking this to look through the list of possible complaints and pick the one that's most appropriate so here's an example for this agency by far the most common dispatch complaint is no other appropriate choice so that could be potential quality improvement item for that agency to help their crews really take minute to pick the most appropriate dispatch complaint option from their list okay so we ran this reports we got list of dispatch complaints how many calls for each one of those complaints next we're going to practice modifying this report so this was good start but let's say that wanted to add something else to this report want to add the average response time so want to know how long it took to get to the scene for each of these different dispatch complaints well we can start with this existing report and just add in that additional piece of information when you want additional information to display on your report you're going to set it up using columns this report has two columns right now the dispatch complaint and the count of the PCRs let's go to columns and see if we can add average response time you'll see that there's very long list of things that could add to the columns and if do add this information let's look for example at unit notified by dispatch you'll see there's whole bunch of columns data elements that could add to columns that are related to unit notified by dispatch in particular there's one here that's called unit notified by dispatch to unit arrived on scene in minutes that's how long it took from the time they were dispatched the time they got on scene if were to add this element directly to my report as column what would happen is would get one row of data in my report for each number of minutes that it took for units to respond so it'd be little weird I'd have incident complaint reported by dispatch as you saw and so we might have for example NBC / transportation incident and then would have response time in minutes like 1 2 3 you know etc however many different values there are and then it would count the number of patient care reports that had that response time so that may be useful but what want to do is actually get an average of response time for each dispatch complaint so want each dispatch complaint just listed once and then tell me on average how long did it take to get there well when you want to do calculation like that or something called an aggregation you'll need to create column so I'll click the Create column button this is where can create an average there are other types of aggregations can do as well like min max median percentiles etc I'm going to call this average response time and the column that want to pull the average from is unit notified by dispatch to unit arrived on scene in minutes okay so to set up this average don't have to do anything about the additional options here at the end I'm taking an average of my essentially response time and I've named it so I'll go ahead and click Add this new column is now part of my report can click generate report again and we'll see how things look it's remembered my filters from moment ago I'm still filtering to this year and to region 8 go ahead and click generate report and here are the results so let's take look for example here at this agency we have the list of different dispatch complaints that they've been on how many calls for each of those complaints and then the average response time so this looks like very rural agency where their average response time to breathing problem calls has been 22 minutes and for many of their dispatch complaints it's larger response time like that however their calls for Falls they've had six of those and their response time on average to those calls has been twelve and half minutes so perhaps they're going to lot of ground-level falls at for example the nursing home that's right in town close to the ambulance as opposed to other calls that are further out from their location and take longer to get to also it can be that some types of calls are there getting there quicker because of higher urgency for that call so I've taken sitting reports ran it then went back to the columns tab and added additional information that wanted to see on the report let's say like this report want to be able to use it again in the future don't want to have to come back every time and find the dispatch complaint reports and then make my modifications all over again and then run it I'd like to just have this ready to run as it is can go up to the Actions menu and don't have save option because this is report that someone else created that cannot modify however have save as option so can save this as my own report I'll go ahead and click save as and I'm going to dispatch complaint with average response time can update the description of that report to remind me what it's about can choose folder to put the report in can also decide if want to share the report with any other users in the system can look them up and share it with them I'm going to just share it with no one and click Save and now it has saved my report so if look over here on in the menu in the my reports section can see that have dispatched complaint with average response time this report that have saved as my own so now could log out of the system log back in later and the report that saved would be there ready for me to run okay so next let's create our own transactional report from scratch want to outline the sequence of steps that you'll want to go through to create your own transactional report the first is what's the question that you want to answer and once you've figured that out is there an existing report in the system that someone else has created that already answers that question or that comes close to it and maybe you would just need to make few modifications like did with the dispatch complaint report then to actually set up this report you're going to go through several tabs in the report setup we're gonna walk through each of those today you'll set up the columns that you want to show on your report some display options how you want the data grouped how you want it sorted and finally the criteria that you want to apply to your report so we're gonna walk through these steps let's come up with an idea of report we'd like to build well let's take something to do with stroke and we want to know when the stroke happened and then we want to know when the patient arrived at the hospital so this would give us you know how long had they had the stroke by the time they got to the hospital so first would ask is there any existing report that already answers or comes close to answering the question well there is report on strokes in the QA Qi folder you know take look at that report because it may give us handy starting point for some things this report would contain all kinds of information about patients who had strokes blood glucose level stroke scale last known well date time which would be great one to look at for how long they had the stroke and in the criteria section this report has been set up to look at certain primary impression codes these are icd-10 diagnosis codes and so it's grabbing those calls with provider impression icd-10 codes of 45 and AI 63 those are the ones for strokes ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes this is also limiting down to only those calls that were 911 response to scene call so it's cutting out the inter-facility transfer calls now in your report you might want to see both you want to see the patient coming into your hospital you want to see them leaving your hospital as well but this report might give us good starting point because it has these diagnosis codes for stroke already put in here so we don't have to go look them up in an icd-10 site so I'm going to take out the criteria about 911 response to seen but I'm gonna leave the other criteria in there it's going to have filter for unit notified by dispatch date times can put in time frame and I'm going to add region filter for performance reasons and we're going to start over here now in the columns section and decide what we want on our report okay so this report would tell us the county the name of the agency the level of service of that agency the incident number from that incident date and time they were notified by dispatch to respond to the call the age of the patient in year's primary impression last known well date/time some vital signs including stroke scale and blood glucose whether the stroke symptoms were resolved during the EMS call if stroke team activation was done we'll have date and time of that response time how long it took to get to seen how long they spent on scene and how long they spent transporting and then where they delivered the patient to let's say though that we want to look you know from the last one known well date time until they actually got the patient to your to your hospital we can see if there's column that answers that question there is there's one that's patient last known well to patient arrive at destination in minutes so I'm going to add that as column on my report if there wasn't an element already defined could create column and can do something called date difference and can enter you know my later date is when they arrived at destination my earlier date is when they had the symptom ons or last known well and then it will calculate the number of you know minutes for example between those two date/time values so you can always do manual calculation like that but this is nice it's already an option in the data set okay so this would give us our report it would it's going to be detailed report so it's going to list one row for every stroke patient and then we're going to see this information okay let's see if we can generate the report I'm going to go ahead and limit down to last month for my filter stuff so that'll be looking at calls that happened last month so I've clicked generate report and we'll give this some time to load okay so we did find some reports in three different MCAS and these different agencies and we see the information from each report here got some interesting data here working from the bottom up this one it took 254 minutes from the time the stroke happened to the time they arrived at the hospital so you know and you could have put it in in hours instead but we're looking at what just over four hours there for that one before they got to the hospital the one in the middle here it's blank it looks like transport time is also blank so this was medical first response agency they didn't transport the patient to hospital therefore we don't know from there one report how long it would have taken from onset to getting to the hospital we do have the last known well date/time that was on April 10th at 5:30 and we do see that they were notified to respond at 6:08 so about half hour after the stroke onset so that's good we also see that they took 12 minutes to get to scene in 30 minutes on scene so we're now up to about an hour and quarter from the time of onset till they left the scene then this top one 11100 two minutes if we take look at the data here they were notified on April 1st they said the last known well was March 25th over week earlier if they put in something like that then yeah you're going to get big number for how long it took from last known well to arrive at destination okay so we played with columns and we played with criteria there's lot of other stuff that's already been set up in this report in display grouping and sorting we're going to show you how that was set up first we can see here when we look at display we're gonna notice these column headings have been somewhat abbreviated compared to the actual data element that was picked except for my last one here that just added this really long label here well we can change that we can go to the display tab and we'll notice here for example this one is just labeled MCA agency level etc this one this last one that added is really long so we could say minutes from last known well to destination arrival so something little shorter for people to look at so that's what the display tab does we can change our column headings we can also change how the information is displayed so for example dates can be displayed in various formats and same thing with last known well this is going to be number but we can decide how many digits it has and whether it's left or right align things like that so that affects the formatting of each data element the grouping tab this report has previously been set up with some grouping levels it has been grouped by county name which is essentially MCA then by agency name then by agency level of service and then you get the list of records within that agency so that's how that grouping is is applying things if we didn't have any groupings then we would just get list of patient care reports and it would be mix of EMS agencies and so sometime that's all you need you don't care which agency brought the patient you just want to see all the reports other times you like to look and really focus on an agency at time that's where something like agency can be set up as group by column and finally the sorting so it will automatically be sorted by any of your groups that you select in the grouping tab and then you can apply additional sorting on top of that and this has one sort set up which is unit notified by dispatch so in other words these reports will be sorted chronologically within each agency but you could sort them by anything else that you have on your report we already looked at the criteria tab and you may have noticed this criteria tab has two pieces it has criteria and it has filters criteria are predefined in the report preset up so we want stroke calls every time this report runs so this has already been set up with those icd-10 diagnosis codes that represent strokes filters on the other hand just pick the data element that you want to have the opportunity to set up as criteria at the moment that you run the report so that's why we have date range and region in here so that at the moment we run the report we can pick what date range we want to run it on if we could set up date range criteria and if we did that you would never see that as filter option instead it would apply specific date range that you had preset up that can be useful too because you can set up date range for quote-unquote last month well then whenever you run the report it's going to give you data on last month whatever month that happens to be there is also an additional options tab and this just affects some of the layout options for the report like colors whether you want headers and footers on your report how many records to show per page that kind of stuff and of course we could save our report through the actions menu lastly once we have report results you can also do an export to PDF you could export to CSV if you want to bring it into Excel and play with it from there and there's some other export options as well encourage you to just log into the system go to report writer and start playing around as you do then you'll start to build report that might be close to what you're looking for and you'll get the results and say well that's almost it then you can go back and tweak it and keep refining it if you're going to create report from scratch not using an existing report as starting point you'll do that by looking in this transactional report section here and choosing EMS incidents as your starting point occasionally you could use some of these others for example if you want to run report about the agencies in your MCA about agency info like what level of service they are and type of service things like that then you can run report using the agency information data set or if you want list of all the people who work for the various agencies in your MCA there's personnel data set but by and large the EMS incidence data set is the data set you'll use to run reports on patient care report data from your agency's