Geographic Discordance Between Patient Residence and Incident Location in Emergency Medical Services Responses

The authors used a public emergency medical services (EMS) dataset to better understand the relationship between patient residence and incident zip codes. Overall, there was “geographic discordance” in more than a quarter of cases; for elderly patients, incident residence zip code was more likely to be the same, but for other patients (e.g., motor vehicle crashes and industrial accidents) there were greater levels of discordance. These findings are important for EMS planning and resource allocation.