Effects of Emergency Medical Services Agency Ownership Status on Patient Transport

Medical insurers have clearly defined which ambulance services will be reimbursed and which will not. Thus, ambulance agencies that provide emergency 9-1-1 services must be highly cognizant of their organization's revenue needs. This presents a distinction between publicly funded and privately funded organizations. This study seeks to identify any differences in the transport decision among agency ownership types.

This retrospective study captured all 9-1-1 ambulance requests in the state of Virginia for the years 2009 through 2013. Each request was answered by either a publicly funded ambulance service or a privately funded ambulance service. The outcome variable of interest was patient disposition and the key explanatory variable was organizational ownership type. Multivariate logistic regression was utilized for data analysis.

Of the 4.6 million 9-1-1 requests, approximately 30% were attended to by a private ambulance service. After controlling for potential confounders, ownership type was found to have a statistically significant effect on the transport decision. Private for-profit ambulance services were 4.5 times more likely to transport a patient than were their publicly funded counterparts (OR: 4.56, 95% CI: 4.47-4.65). Private non-profit organizations were twice as likely to engage in patient transport (OR: 2.12, 95% CI: 2.09-2.14). Private for-profit ambulance organizations were also found to be less likely to allow for patient refusal (OR: 0.54, 95% CI: 0.53-0.55) or to medically treat on-scene without subsequent transport (OR: 0.48, 95% CI: 0.45-0.50).

Given the reimbursement practices of medical insurers, private ambulance services are incentivized towards patient transport. Operational revenue for these services is not generated through public budgeting processes but through user fees. Thus, private agencies are more reliant on billable services than are their publicly funded counterparts.