Depending on local laws, US emergency services field providers usually don't officially declare legal death, though there are protocols for either not commencing or for ceasing resuscitation efforts.
These don't involve electroencephalography.
Factors input in this decision and these protocols vary, but can include evidence of insufficient structures for maintaining life (eg: decapitation), absence of vitals, rigor, lividity (blood pooling), absent electrocardiogram, rescuer exhaustion, and (for cases involving cardiac) failure of defibrillation and advanced cardiac life support where applicable. These factors are usually used in combinations; you need more than one of these, and no vitals.
Contraventions can include hypothermia, which may have been a factor in the cited case, and cold-water drowning.
Many of these cases can and do involve a consultation with the patient's physician, or with the emergency physician
Emergency transport of patients that are presumed dead is not without risks to members of the community and to the EMS crew; these can include vehicular collisions with emergency vehicles, as well as simply not the crew unavailable for another call. Funding also applies, as survival to discharge is (in various studies) not expected in cases where pre-hospital advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) has been administered, and has failed. (If ACLS didn't work in the field, it's equally unlikely to work after a five or fifteen or half-hour transport to an emergency facility.)
I'm not aware of any US emergency services field providers that are using electroencephalography for this nor any field equipment for this, nor even any discussions of its applicability in the field.
On the other hand, capnography has been a subject of various discussions for some years now among emergency physicians and hospitals and field providers, including its use for assessing correct placement of breathing tubes, and waveforms for differentiating various respiratory dysfunctions.
A paramedic I know failed to revive an elderly woman who'd collapsed at home. The rescue attempts were watched by the woman's (panicked) daughter, who was a nurse. The daughter later threatened to sue, saying he was negligent for not performing a procedure that she thought was necessary. Paramedic was called before some lawyers, at which point they found out he'd actually done a lot more than protocol had required in those circumstances, and the case was dropped.
Nice way to say thanks for trying to save your mom.
That's a whole lot more paperwork than "Confirmed asystole in 3 leads, see attached strip"
Me? I build websites. If something blows up it can always be fixed. New hardware can be bought. Back ups restored. Apart from some downtime, everything is as good as new.
Them? Turn up on a job not necessarily knowing what to expect. Some times they'll find a situation they can literally do nothing about and, oooops, someone's dead.
Someone dying in front of me is an incredibly bad day at the office i'll never forget. Watching people die as an emergency responder is kinda part of the job description.
The worlds aren't as far apart as you might think... While the stakes (and the pace) are obviously different, I think I enjoy both of them because of the challenge they present. My favorite part of the development process is troubleshooting (either new code or old... doesn't really matter). EMS is really all about troubleshooting. _Something_ is causing whatever this patient's issue is, I just need to figure out what it is and mitigate it to the best of my ability.
This new finding should influence laws and procedures in the future.
Death isn't a single nor simple event; it's a progression.
Hypothermia, for instance, has seen changes in training and protocols.
Changes in geriatric procedures and medicines, too.
Laws, too, change. Sometimes positively. Sometimes not.
Medical practice? That too changes.
These practices and these legal areas all tend to move slowly and sometimes seemingly too slowly, and with considerations beyond a single survival. With caution. Sometimes with consideration of the equipment costs, of patient outcomes, of training costs and a number of trade-offs all apply. Sometimes not.
One of the problems for emergency services can involve competing requirements for time and training. Various of the the "great ideas" that are around, and that become standards or sometimes legal requirements. Cases which involve training requirements for events or situations or patient conditions that field providers will likely never encounter, but for which training is required. Or cases where the same training has been repackaged by some other entity, mandated, and whole organizations has to go through what is effectively the same training all over again.
And then there are the inevitable politics.
If this stuff is running "correctly", it's based on evidence and on the needs of the local community. But it's all a compromise. It's sometimes messy. And everybody eventually dies.