The Cost of EMS: Special Report

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EMS has come under increased scrutiny in the last decade as insurance companies, managed care organizations, elected officials, government leaders and the public have demanded to know how their healthcare dollars are being spent. EMS administrators have responded by handing over their budgets, often giving line-item descriptions for every dollar they want to spend. Sometimes budgets are approved; more often they are slashed as local governments and private industry try to keep pace with a fluctuating economy.

In the meantime, EMS as a whole is getting shortchanged because government has never been educated on the true costs of operating an effective emergency medical system. Costs have been hidden in fire department, PSAP, law enforcement and hospital budgets. The federal government has focused its attention exclusively on ambulance transport, which represents only a part of the total EMS system. And no one has painted a true comprehensive picture of all of the components of EMS from which payers can really understand how their dollars are being spent to provide this critical element of public safety and health to our nation’s communities.

EMS Best Practices, Inc. and the Florida Emergency Medicine Foundation, in conjunction with the Sand Key EMS Summit 2001, convened a panel of EMS managers, fire department leaders, medical directors, regulators and educators to discuss EMS system costs at a meeting in Clearwater Beach, Florida in September 2001. At this meeting, the group was tasked with defining the essential elements of an EMS system for which there are associated costs. Once these elements were defined, the group then was asked to determine which costs of an EMS system could be measured and how that measurement might be obtained. The findings of that gathering are in this 36 page report.