By Greta Foss

Summer Intern

In 2024, the Minnesota state legislature passed a bill with the intent to help alleviate a few of the issues that plagued rural EMS. This included a restructuring of the Emergency Medical Services Regulatory Board to the Office of Emergency Services, $30 million in aid much of which went to emergency one time grants to help fund rural EMS specifically, and a pilot sprint medic program. 

The sprint medic program was designed to make sure that in the event of an emergency, an equipped paramedic, who is roaming their assigned area at all times, would be able to respond in a timely manner and provide advanced life support care to the patient while the local ambulance drives to the scene. 

“It is a little bit of an experiment to see, where does this work best? What are some things that need to be tweaked in the future? The goal isn’t for everything to be perfect, the goal is to learn from the experiences in rural Minnesota and see what could perhaps help other communities in the state going forward. And the nice thing is we had, Otter Tail County Board of Commissioners, Perham EMS, Grant County Board of Commissioners, they were willing to raise their hand and say, yes, we want to give this a try on behalf of the state and see what the learnings are,” said Minnesota state Senator, Jordan Rasmusson. 

Rasmusson was very influential in the passage of this bill, and was named Legislator of the Year by the Minnesota Ambulance Association in March of last year. 

The sprint medic is just a pilot program, and once state funding is up, the counties that are currently part of the program do not have to continue to use a sprint pilot, but they have the option to fund the program themselves. The Grant County Board of Commissioners approved their budget which included seeing the sprint program continuing in their county after the state funding was up. 

“I would say Otter Tail County had less experience using sprint medics, so it’s, I think, taken a little longer for people to get into the groove, but we’re definitely finding benefits from it, especially when some of the rural ambulance services are having staffing issues. The sprint medic can be available to help supplement the volunteer services that a lot of our areas rely on,” said Rasmusson.

In both Otter Tail and Grant County, between February and December of 2025, the sprint medic responded to 202 calls with an average of a nine minute response time. On top of that, there were 120 ambulance transports within the counties, in which a sprint medic was on the ambulance. 

The funding for the sprint program is currently set to be up in June of 2027, with an extension of funding possible. It will then be up to the county to decide if the program has been successful enough to continue. 

“I think the challenge with rural EMS is the call volume. So if you go to Hennepin EMS in Minneapolis, they actually make money because they’ll do more calls on a busy Friday night than some of the rural services will do all year. Yet those rural services still have to have the ambulances, they still have to have training, they still have to have staff or volunteers that are ready to answer that call,” said Rasmusson.

One of the main issues with most rural EMS is lack of funding. Without proper funding many rural EMS have struggled to be able to pay full-time employees. Many EMS systems used to get by paying full-time employees by bringing on many volunteers to help supplement the costs. But in recent years the rates at which people are able to volunteer their time and effort for little to no money is declining. 

“One of the challenges we have is finding volunteer EMS personnel. Yeah, we see, like, in Henning, for example, you know, people aging out and not as many younger people coming in. And so are there incentives that we can put into place to try to draw more people into the EMS? And I also think there’s gonna have to be more partnerships across EMS providers,” said Rasmusson.

So without the call volume that some of the larger cities have, where does rural EMS find its funding, and what do the ambulances do when they run out?

According to the Office of Emergencey Medical Services:

• EMS reimbursement is primarily dependent on patient transportation while they must also remain ready at all times regardless of patient calls. This means insurance reimbursment is often insufficient in offsetting operational expenses. 

• In the West-Central region over $2.3 million of the total expenses were not covered by insurance.

• Each region receives a grant from a relief account that collects its funding via surcharges on seatbelt citations. The funding that is available in this fund has fallen in the past few years. In the state fiscal year 2019, the amount deposited into the account per region was about $77,000. In the state fiscal year 2025 that amount had dropped to $39,000.

• 63 percent of ambulance services reported a loss in finances during the 2025 reporting cycle.

Solutions to the challenges that rural EMS have faced will most likely not solve the entire problem, but they can help to alleviate some of the stress that the services face. 

“I think, ultimately, you’re going to see more regionalization with EMS, and it doesn’t mean that local communities are going to lose services. That means there’s gonna be more partnerships across services. And so I go back to the Grant County example where, you know, they haven’t had an EMS provider go away, but they almost operate as if there’s one county wide EMS service,” Rasmusson said

According to Senator Rasmusson, this regionalization would allow for more sharing of resources and staff. Partnerships and regionalizations will allow for larger ambulance services to grow and expand their outreach while maybe taking on the resources that smaller services can provide but not support. 

Regionalization does not come without its downsides though. As the amount of area that an ambulance needs to cover grows, their ability to provide care at the necessary speeds may decrease and pressure may build. 

“If they had to seek out ambulance services from towns over, then that’s also putting strain on those towns, and then that’s just going to cause even more stress,” aid Chelsey Waskosky of the Henning Ambulance Service.

The Henning Ambulance Service is currently working through a couple options for how to keep the service floating. Their decision has not yet been finalized.