In Guilford County, North Carolina, a small number of residents account for a disproportionate number of calls to EMS. These residents, known as “super users,” often have complex, co-occurring needs. For many of them, EMS represents the last accessible avenue to seek medical care and social support. But Guilford County paramedics and EMTs face significant time and capacity constraints, and they are not fully equipped to address the underlying social and medical conditions driving repeat non-emergency calls. The Adult Resource Team (ART) was created in 2023 to bridge that gap, connecting high-frequency, non-emergency EMS users to social services and wraparound support. But the ART’s current case management process depends on ad hoc referrals from first responders, a system that is imprecise and difficult to scale.
This semester, our team worked to develop and evaluate a predictive risk model to better identify patients at high risk of becoming super users. Using three years of anonymized EMS dispatch records, we built a logistic model that scores patients by their likelihood of becoming super users. At the ART’s current capacity, the model identifies approximately four in ten of all future super users in Guilford County, more than doubling the reach of the ad hoc referral system.
