The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — As long as the state is collecting data on the response times of emergency medical service runs by fire departments throughout Ohio, that information should be public.
Instead, since 2002, while the Ohio Emergency Medical Services Agency has required fire departments to report their EMS response times, state law says information about individual departments can’t be released to the public. The agency releases only countywide average response times, a meaningless aggregation, because response times among departments could vary widely.
How fast an ambulance can get to you when you’re having a heart attack or other medical emergency is one of the most meaningful ways to gauge the effectiveness of an EMS operation. For people with certain medical conditions, it could pose a life-or-death difference in deciding where to live.
At minimum, the public could use that information to judge the performance of the local fire department and to decide whether to vote for a new tax levy to support it. Publication of response times would spur improvements in departments with below-par performance.
Instead, the state requires fire departments to go to the time and expense of compiling and submitting data but then does little with it.
Why the legislature wrote secrecy into the EMS law is a mystery. The state has collected information on fire-run response times since the 1980s, and that information always has been public. Many fire departments voluntarily give out their response times to anyone who asks.
But a statewide database, allowing comparisons among departments and tracking of trends, would be far more useful.
Regardless of that, though, the law keeping the information secret runs counter to the intent of Ohio’s Sunshine Law mandating open government and public records. An opinion of the state attorney general’s office said the secrecy is permissible, but the issue should be revisited. There is no privacy interest that justifies secrecy. Response times do not identify EMS patients and their conditions.
The legislature should rewrite the law so that this data can be put to use to improve emergency medical help for Ohioans.