US EMS Protocol Census
Early release. Data building nightly.

Prehospital care varies from agency to agency, and nobody could see how.

Protocols live in thousands of separate PDFs, so the differences between them have never been readable in one place. The United States EMS Protocol Census reads what agencies publish and turns it into a versioned public record of the drugs, doses and routes they carry, so you can compare agencies across the country. It rebuilds itself every night from the agencies' own documents.

Alaska: 0 current protocolsAlabama: 4 current protocols, has an agency pageArkansas: 0 current protocolsArizona: 4 current protocols, has an agency pageCalifornia: 23 current protocols, has an agency pageColorado: 6 current protocols, has an agency pageConnecticut: 0 current protocolsDistrict of Columbia: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageDelaware: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageFlorida: 11 current protocols, has an agency pageGeorgia: 6 current protocols, has an agency pageHawaii: 1 current protocolIowa: 4 current protocolsIdaho: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageIllinois: 14 current protocols, has an agency pageIndiana: 7 current protocols, has an agency pageKansas: 3 current protocolsKentucky: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageLouisiana: 3 current protocols, has an agency pageMassachusetts: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageMaryland: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageMaine: 1 current protocolMichigan: 17 current protocols, has an agency pageMinnesota: 2 current protocolsMissouri: 3 current protocols, has an agency pageMississippi: 1 current protocolMontana: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageNorth Carolina: 14 current protocols, has an agency pageNorth Dakota: 0 current protocolsNebraska: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageNew Hampshire: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageNew Jersey: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageNew Mexico: 1 current protocolNevada: 3 current protocols, has an agency pageNew York: 5 current protocols, has an agency pageOhio: 7 current protocols, has an agency pageOklahoma: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageOregon: 7 current protocols, has an agency pagePennsylvania: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageRhode Island: 1 current protocolSouth Carolina: 5 current protocols, has an agency pageSouth Dakota: 2 current protocolsTennessee: 6 current protocols, has an agency pageTexas: 20 current protocols, has an agency pageUtah: 4 current protocols, has an agency pageVirginia: 6 current protocols, has an agency pageVermont: 2 current protocols, has an agency pageWashington: 11 current protocols, has an agency pageWisconsin: 9 current protocols, has an agency pageWest Virginia: 1 current protocol, has an agency pageWyoming: 1 current protocol236116147171457756206119
37 states with an agency page, 10 more with protocols but no page yet, 4 not yet covered. Shaded by protocols per state, one per agency, outlined where an agency has its own page. Coverage grows every night.

251 protocols223 agencies159 agency pages1,739 documents read241 waiting to be matched to an agency27,740 dosesas of 2026-09-20

Why it matters

  • A medic who changes agencies relearns every dose. The drug is the same and the number is different, and until now there was no way to see which agencies differ or by how much.
  • A medical director revising a protocol has no benchmark. Writing the next version means guessing at what everyone else does. The census shows what the rest of the country actually carries, with the documents behind it.
  • Researchers have never had the dataset. There has been no denominator for prehospital medicine, so questions about how care varies could not be asked, let alone answered.
  • Arguing for EMS pay, training and staffing takes evidence. Anecdote loses those arguments. Numbers that anyone can check and cite do better.
  • It updates every night, and agencies decide whether they are in it. New documents are read and revisions become new versions with the old one kept in the history. Send a public URL to be listed, or ask to be removed and it comes down the same day, no reason needed.

26,551 entries parsed to a number and route, 477 partially, 712 kept as written. Raw entries are counted and shown as written, never dropped. 64 more agencies are counted but have too little published detail for a page yet.

Drugs272

Doses, indications and routes for each, across every agency that carries it.

States37

Coverage by state

StateAgencies with a protocolAgencies withoutStatewide protocol
Alabama02Yes
Arizona10Yes
California180No
Colorado50No
District of Columbia10No
Delaware01Yes
Florida110No
Georgia20Yes
Idaho11Yes
Illinois70No
Indiana30Yes
Kentucky11Yes
Louisiana10Yes
Massachusetts02Yes
Maryland01Yes
Michigan95Yes
Missouri20No
Montana01Yes
North Carolina101Yes
Nebraska02Yes
New Hampshire01Yes
New Jersey01Yes
Nevada10Yes
New York21Yes
Ohio22Yes
Oklahoma11Yes
Oregon30No
Pennsylvania01Yes
South Carolina41Yes
Tennessee41Yes
Texas170No
Utah21Yes
Virginia40No
Vermont02Yes
Washington101Yes
Wisconsin30No
West Virginia01Yes

Outside the United States3

Protocols the census has read from outside the US. They are held to the same sourcing rules, and are kept out of every United States figure on this page.

Agencies159

Each agency page holds that agency's protocol, its earlier versions and every dose it publishes. 64 more agencies are counted but have too little published detail for a page yet.

How this is built

Methodology: where documents come from, what is read out of them, what is not captured, and why no dose-level accuracy number is published. Data license: summaries are CC BY 4.0; row-level data is not published.

State of US EMS Protocols, Q3 2026: the quarterly edition, the groups where published protocols disagree most, aggregate only.

List your agency

If your agency's protocols are a public record and you would like them in the census, or you want an existing listing corrected or removed, send the document's public URL and we will handle it. Removal is same-day, no reason needed.

Cite this

United States EMS Protocol Census, as of 2026-09-20. https://protoquiz.com/census/