Multnomah Co. fines ambulance company AMR more than $500K for slow response times

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - Multnomah County is fining ambulance company American Medical Response (AMR) more than half a million dollars for failing to arrive at 911 calls in the required time.

The county says AMR must pay a total of $513,650.

According to county officials, the ambulance provider fell short of expectations in August. Failing to arrive within eight minutes of emergency calls in urban areas.

Of the 11,500 calls AMR responded to that month, the county says AMR was late 14-percent of the time.

County chair Jessica Vega-Pederson says the county wants to work with AMR to solve the problem.

In a statement to FOX 12 on Tuesday evening, a spokesperson for AMR said the following in response:

“American Medical Response (AMR) received the August fine report from Multnomah County officials at 3:34 p.m. today. As an organization, we continue to meet with City and County officials to educate everyone on the current state of EMS in Multnomah County. It is our continued belief that the only course of action to improve EMS response times in Multnomah County is to modify our deployment to allow paramedics to work with EMTs to respond to all calls for service. The national shortage of paramedics is having a disproportionate impact to Multnomah County emergency services due to the county’s unique requirement for two paramedics on every 911 ambulance. AMR operates across 49 states, and AMR Multnomah is the only operation in the entire organization that has such a mandate. Our neighboring counties have provided excellent service with paramedic/EMT deployments, and Multnomah County would be no different regardless of the level of fire department response to low and moderate acuity call types. AMR strongly believes allowing EMTs to work with paramedics is the only viable way to improve response time performance now and for the foreseeable future.”

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