If Medicare could reimburse ambulances for transporting patients to places other than a hospital emergency department (ED), the program could save between $283 million and $560 million a year, a government analysis found. Roughly 35% of Medicare patients who called 911 and were taken to a hospital were relatively low-acuity cases and could be treated at places other than a hospital ED, a study by Gregg Margolis, PhD, director of healthcare systems and health policy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and colleagues found. Read article...

Margolis’s report supports NAEMT’s recent comment to CMS on ambulance reimbursement.