Novel Methodology for linking 911 dispatch categories with a death registry: Mortality rates of selected dispatch categories

Objectives: Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) is a system used to assign medical 9-1-1 calls to one of 35 chief complaints that are further categorized in order of increasing priority, Alpha through Echo. In this descriptive study we demonstrate the methodology of matching MPDS codes to a county mortality registry. We also evaluated the ability of select MPDS codes (fall, respiratory, sick person, and abdominal pain) to predict mortality up to 30 days for all ages transported by Alameda County Emergency Medical Services (EMS).