How Many Time-Critical Emergencies? A Population-Based National Estimate of Attended Events per 100,000 US Residents

US fire and EMS crews attend an estimated 589 time-critical events per 100,000 residents each year, with 583 medical events, including 350 Tier A cases.

• Why it matters: The work fills a gap in national estimates of how often response time plausibly affects outcomes, providing a denominator for valuing faster response.
• What they did: Using registry and dataset counts for 30 conditions, the authors classified Tier A versus Tier B by whether delays of minutes to hours were linked to death or major disability, and scaled fire/rescue counts from National Emergency Response Information System data.
• The result: Medical events totaled 583 after removing overlap, with 350 Tier A led by ischemic stroke (120.2) and EMS-treated cardiac arrest (78.7), while opioid overdose (123.4) drove 233 Tier B events.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.