Practice Management
Las Vegas is the latest municipality to recognize that not all 911 calls require response with a fully equipped ambulance and EMS crew. As part of a new pilot program by the Las Vegas Fire and Rescue Department, 911 operators are being trained to identify which calls really do require a full emergency response, and which could be transferred to a specially trained nurse who can guide the patient to the right level of care—including …
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Residents who call 911 for immediate medical care could find themselves getting a lift from a rideshare to a local urgent care center instead of riding in an ambulance, sirens wailing, to the emergency room thanks to a pilot program Las Vegas Fire launched in Las Vegas. With more than two thirds of its roughly 600,000 annual calls being for medical assistance, the fire department was looking for ways to cut costs but not the …
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A pilot program in Prince George’s County, Maryland has trained firefighters responding to 911 calls from patients who don’t meet the criteria for true emergent care. In one case cited in a Washington Post article, responders checked on a woman who was in the habit of calling 911 several times a week, with an unnecessary (and costly) trip to the emergency room following most often before the program launched. On that day, though, she had …
Read MoreUrgent message: New data indicate that calls to 911 from family medicine and urgent care offices and subsequent transport to ED occur for a wide range of reasons, with the distribution varying to a large degree based on the age of the patient and the practice setting. Introduction Life-threatening emergencies have been reported to occur in primary care medical offices.1,2 However, the type of medical emergencies that occur remains unclear. Previous studies that have attempted …
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