Stephanie Ostroff is a speech-language pathologist and journalist. She enjoys blending knowledge from both fields to shine a light on innovators and changemakers in health care.
Justin Reed, FACPE, MHCI ’24, forges partnerships between first responders and hospitals to improve access to care
Working in Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Justin Reed, MHCI ’24, occupies multiple intersecting spaces: Health care and public safety. Transportation and life-saving treatment. An ambulance and the emergency department lobby.
Cy-Fair Fire Department in Houston, Texas, provides emergency medical services to 640,000 residents across 13 stations in Harris County. Reed serves as the Assistant Chief of EMS. Yet he once felt out of place walking into a hospital conference room.
That changed after he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Health Care Innovation (MHCI). Through the program, Reed developed a strong sense of belonging in health care and the insight he needed to influence hospital leaders and his EMS team.
“I realized I belong here. We belong here,” says Reed. “So I really started championing that—trying to get people to understand that EMS is health care. I need the hospitals to see it, but I also need EMS to see it.”
I always saw myself as a disruptive innovator, but I never really had the education behind it to give myself the credit when speaking with someone new. That's where the MHCI program helped me actually learn and understand academically what innovation should look like.
Reed’s work illustrates his belief. He has helped launch partnerships that maximize hospital and EMS resources while expediting care, including a “door-to-lobby” emergency department initiative that’s piquing the interest of hospitals across the country. He also presented at the 2025 American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Congress on Healthcare Leadership, marking the first time a first responder has done so.
“I always saw myself as a disruptive innovator, but I never really had the education behind it to give myself the credit when speaking with someone new,” says Reed. “That's where the MHCI program helped me actually learn and understand academically what innovation should look like. And that was a big component I was missing.”
Influencing the C-suite
At the ACHE Congress, Reed presented on “Why Strong Prehospital/Hospital Partnerships Are Good for Business…and Good for Patients.” He spoke from experience.
With a deeper understanding of hospital pain points and health care as a whole, Reed convinced Texas hospital executives to integrate EMS into the emergency department’s system design. The solution he pitched, developed by Cy-Fair Fire Department’s District Clinical Chief, ensures those who need life-saving intervention receive it faster, while reducing the burden EMS places on hospitals for less critical care.
Traditionally, EMS and hospitals operate independently from one another, resulting in “wall times”: stretchers waiting for hours in hospital hallways with paramedics. Until the patient is registered and integrated into the emergency department’s system, paramedics are unable to respond to the next call.
The “door-to-lobby” initiative Reed helped influence triages patients after they dial 911. Individuals who require less critical care are offered a telephone consultation with a physician or transportation to a freestanding emergency department. Those who need potentially life-saving intervention (only about 7%, Reed says, citing a 2020 study published in Prehospital Emergency Care) are brought directly to a hospital emergency department lobby and registered immediately, folding seamlessly into the system and freeing up the EMS crew to get back in service.
Reed’s team is studying the “door-to-lobby” program and plans to publish the results. He hopes to scale the initiative across the region. After speaking at ACHE’s Congress, he’s received calls from Georgia and Washington state with interest in replicating the process.
“Having the lens of seeing us as a cog in the health care continuum helped me understand how to pitch a solution,” Reed says. He learned in the MHCI program how to talk to the C-suite in language the executives would understand. “I was able to say: ‘You're losing money because you have an inefficient system design, and you actually have a liability because you have paramedics practicing medicine without a license in your facility.’ Those things that I pulled from the MHCI helped me sell that to everybody.”
Advocating for ‘invisible’ patients
The “door-to-lobby” program is just one innovative partnership Reed has helped foster between EMS and the wider health care system. At Cy-Fair Fire Department, EMS addresses both preventive care and emergency care, serving as the missing link between underserved populations and medical providers.
Where I think EMS lends so much value to health care is we have unfettered access to these individuals every day.
In collaboration with local hospitals, the Cy-Fair EMS team offers prenatal screening exams and follow-up visits for postpartum patients with preeclampsia. They reverse cardiac arrest after fentanyl poisoning, provide buprenorphine, and connect patients to recovery resources. And they screen for food insecurity, creating a pathway between food pantries and individuals in need.
“We’re the glue, right? Because we connect with palliative care, the fire department, police, home health. We connect with the emergency department, we connect with rehabilitation services,” says Reed. “EMS is access to health care. That's the thing I'm now championing.”