A District of Columbia program that placed nurses in 911 call centers to triage non-life-threatening calls resulted in a drop of ambulance dispatches from 97% to 56%.
In the Right Care, Right Now program 911 dispatchers redirect non-emergency calls to nurses who diagnose patients over the phone, advise callers on where to seek care and arrange for non-emergency transportation. The program, launched in 2018 and evaluated by researchers from Georgetown University, American University and The Lab @ D, all based in D.C., has since triaged nearly 75,000 non-emergency 911 calls and directed about 35,000 of those callers to appropriate care sites.
Between April 2018 and February 2019, the proportion of calls resulting in an ambulance transport dropped from 73% to 45%. Visits to the emergency department among Medicaid beneficiaries within 24 hours of the 911 call also fell from 29.5% to 25.1%. And the number of callers who visited primary care physicians instead of emergency care rose from 2.5% to 8.2%.
The results were published May 2024 in Nature Human Behaviour.
The District of Columbia's 911 center is one of the busiest in the country, right behind New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. In 2023, the DC center received more than 1.7 million calls for service.