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Documenting social risk factors in EMS charts

Identification and Documentation of Patient Social Risk Factors in the Prehospital Setting: A Pilot Implementation
Prehospital Emergency Care · Added 4 June 2026

This pilot implementation tested whether EMS clinicians can reliably identify and document patient social risk factors during routine care, finding that structured documentation is feasible but requires workflow integration and clinician training.

Study type

Cohort

Design

Retrospective cohort of charted encounters after implementing a required 14-item social risk factor documentation tool

Participants

57,899 adult EMS encounters

Main finding

Only 4.0% of encounters (n = 2,326) had a documented social risk factor; most common were substance use (31.3%), housing instability (25.7%) and disability (25.4%); >75% of encounters were low acuity.

Caveat

Single agency pilot; low documentation rate may reflect screening or workflow barriers rather than true prevalence

Bottom line

Hypothesis-generating

Learning goal

Understand how routine documentation of social risk factors shapes referral pathways and continuity of care for my patients.

More

• Topic: Operations & systems
• Daily scan: 4 June 2026

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