How important are delays in treatment for health outcomes? The case of ambulance response time and cardiovascular events.

The cost effectiveness of medical treatments is not precisely known due to the compounding effect of multiple determining factors. Ambulance response time (RT) to emergency calls is exploited to learn more about the effect of the timing of treatment on health outcomes. This causal relation is identified by exploiting rainfall at the time of the ambulance run as a shock to RT. The analysis focuses on patients who have undergone a cardiac event and shows that a one-minute increase in average RT leads to 105 more deaths each year in one Italian region. Finally, the economic value of the lives that would be saved by reducing RT is quantified to facilitate policymaking.