Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services is handling more of its own calls and relying less on help from regional EMS providers after adding emergency medical technicians to its force in May — a change that could mean faster response times to medical calls across the county.

The city in May hired 14 EMTs to supplement its force of 161 paramedics in a bid to lighten the load on paramedics, reduce the city’s reliance on mutual aid and cut overtime costs.

Six months in, overtime has not yet seen a significant decline, but the city’s reliance on mutual aid — when EMS agencies outside the city answer Pittsburgh’s calls while city paramedics are busy on other calls — has dropped significantly, Chief Robert Farrow said Tuesday.

Before the EMTs were hired, Pittsburgh called for mutual aid 16 times a week on average, Chief Farrow said. That has dropped to two times a week with the addition of the EMTs, he said.

The shift allows regional crews to stay closer to home and answer more of their own calls, reducing mutual aid reliance throughout the the region, said Chief Todd Pritchard, who heads the Medical Rescue Team South Authority in Mt. Lebanon.

“If we’re not handling a call in the city of Pittsburgh, we have resources available for our own calls,” Chief Pritchard said. “Before, we’d see a trickle down. We’d respond to Pittsburgh, then we’d have a call in our area, and we’d have to call for mutual aid in our own district. So this prevents that trickle-down effect.”

In the first five months of the year, Chief Pritchard’s nonprofit agency ran 36 mutual aid calls in the city, he said. In the six months since the city hired the EMTs, he’s run just 17.

At other regional EMS agencies, the impact is even greater: Ross/West View Emergency Medical Services answered 300 fewer calls in the first seven months of 2017 than it did in 2016, assistant director Greg Porter said.

“A vast majority of that is city calls we didn’t have to go to,” Mr. Porter said.

The change allows his crews to respond faster and more consistently in their primary communities, he said.

But it also knocks down the agency’s revenue. Each time Mr. Porter’s crews responded to a call in Pittsburgh, he was able to charge for those services. Mr. Porter estimated the agency will lose about $100,000 in revenue in 2017 due to the switch. He didn’t expect that loss to impact his staffing and said he’s glad to see the city’s EMTs making such an impact.

“They’re handling the majority of their calls on their own,” Mr. Porter said.

EMTs receive less training than paramedics and are sent to the city’s minor and low-priority calls, while paramedics handle more serious calls. Chief Farrow said that from their start date on May 28 through Dec. 4, the city’s EMTs responded to 4,292 of the 6,674 low-priority calls the bureau received — or 64 percent.

Because EMTs are handling the least critical calls, the city’s paramedics are more available to respond to serious calls, Chief Farrow said. Paramedics responded to 27,076 calls between the end of May and start of December.

So far, adding the EMTs has not had a major impact on the bureau’s overtime. The bureau logged 138,444 hours of overtime in all of 2016, costing the city $4.5 million, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

To date this year, the city has spent $4.2 million on 127,931 hours of overtime — about 63 percent of that overtime was logged after the EMTs began in late May.

Sam Ashbaugh, the city’s chief financial officer, said the city did not expect to see a reduction in overtime for at least two years, in part because some paramedics worked overtime to train the EMTs this year and for a variety of other reasons, including special events around the holidays that require overtime.

“We knew and assumed it would take at least two years to fully implement and be able to realize all the benefits,” Mr. Ashbaugh said, “including reduced overtime for paramedics, increased revenue, reduced injuries for paramedics and reduced reliance on suburban providers for mutual aid calls.”

Jeff Tremel, president of the Fraternal Association of Professional Paramedics Local 1, said the addition of EMTs means overall, paramedics are running slightly fewer calls each day, which does help to decrease job stress.

“The two extra units on each shift definitely makes a difference,” he said.

The response time for paramedics has also gotten 30 seconds faster since EMTs were added — dropping from nine minutes to eight minutes and 30 seconds, Chief Farrow said. That includes calls that paramedics respond to without using their lights and sirens, he added.

The city will hire an additional six EMTs in January to bring them up to full staffing levels, Chief Farrow said, which could also help reduce overtime.

Shelly Bradbury: 412-263-1999, sbradbury@post-gazette.com or follow @ShellyBradbury on Twitter.

First Published: December 13, 2017, 12:00 p.m.