TUCSON COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY CARE REDUCES 911 CALL VOLUME IN TUCSON, AZ

Abstract

One of the biggest costs that emergency departments face, and a large contributing factor to EMS-provider burnout, across the nation is the provision of non-urgent care to patients who would have been better served by a primary care physician or other community resource. And Tucson, AZ, is no exception. Due to this, numerous programs have emerged throughout the country with the goal of reducing non-emergent use of emergency services by enlisting the help of firefighters, nurses, paramedics, and behavioral health specialists (recruited specifically for this purpose) to ease the burden on other EMS crews. Tucson Collaborative Community Care (TC-3) is modeled after this newly-emerging philosophy of community paramedicine. This study was designed to evaluate the efficacy of the TC-3 program at reducing 911 calls in the Tucson community. The analysis was also broken down to identify the primary physiologic and pathologic complaints that result in frequent 911 calls. We used a paired T-test to analyze the call volume for 157 subjects in order to determine the significance of the number of 911 calls one year prior to the case closure versus the number of calls one year post-closure. Our results demonstrated that the program was overall effective at reducing non-emergency EMS calls with a p-value of 0.030. However, the program didn’t produce a statistically significant reduction within the specific categories (with the exception of Area of Concern: Age-related Concerns).