Frequently Asked Questions

EMSGrades accepts reviews from anyone with direct, firsthand experience with the agency or provider being reviewed. This includes patients, family members of patients, bystanders who witnessed care being delivered, current and former EMS employees reviewing their employer, and EMS employers reviewing providers they have supervised.

You must have personal, direct experience with the subject of your review. Reviews based on secondhand accounts, rumors, or general reputation without personal interaction are not permitted.

No. Anonymous and pseudonymous reviews are permitted. You are not required to provide your real name to submit a review.

However, reviewers who choose to verify their identity or their employment relationship receive a Verified badge on their review, which many readers find adds credibility. Verification is always optional.

Agencies cannot remove reviews simply because they disagree with them or find them negative. EMSGrades will only remove a review if it clearly violates our Community Guidelines — for example, if it contains fabricated content, prohibited personal information, or was submitted in bad faith by a direct competitor.

Agencies with paid subscriptions can submit a formal dispute through our Review Dispute Policy process, and can post a public response to any review on their profile. A professional public response is often the most effective way to address a review an agency believes is unfair.

We use a combination of automated screening and human moderation to detect and remove reviews that violate our policies. Specific measures include screening for reviews submitted from the same device or network as an agency, patterns consistent with coordinated review campaigns, reviews that appear to have been submitted by competitors, and content that does not reflect a genuine firsthand experience.

We also prohibit users from creating multiple accounts and investigate any credible report of review manipulation. Accounts found to be operating in bad faith are permanently suspended.

Yes. You can edit or delete a review you submitted at any time through your account settings. If you submitted a review anonymously without creating an account, please contact us at hello@emsgrades.com with details about the review and we will assist you.

If you are an agency and believe a specific review contains verifiable false statements of fact, you can submit a formal dispute through our Review Dispute Policy. Please review that policy carefully before submitting — we investigate disputes that allege specific factual violations, but we do not remove reviews simply because an agency disputes the reviewer's characterization of events.

In most cases, a professional public response to the review is the most effective and most visible action you can take.

An EMSGrades letter grade is an aggregated score reflecting the community's collective experience with an agency or provider across multiple review categories. Grades run from A+ through F and are calculated from the ratings submitted by verified and unverified reviewers over time.

A grade represents public experience and perception — it is not an official government rating, a clinical audit result, or an accreditation status. It reflects what patients, families, and providers have reported from their direct interactions.

Agency grades are calculated across eight categories:

• Equipment Maintenance and Readiness
• Clinical Protocol Quality
• Management and Leadership
• Staffing Levels and Scheduling
• Workplace Safety Culture
• Training and Continuing Education Support
• Compensation and Benefits Transparency
• Shift Length Practices

Each category is weighted in the overall grade calculation. Shift Length Practices is treated as a safety flag rather than a standard letter grade category, given its direct relationship to provider and patient safety.

Individual provider grades are calculated across six categories:

• Clinical Knowledge and Competence
• Patient Communication and Bedside Manner
• Teamwork and Crew Dynamics
• Documentation and Attention to Detail
• Professionalism and Appearance
• Ethical Conduct and Integrity

No. Subscription status has absolutely no influence on an agency's grade or on how reviews are displayed. Agencies cannot pay to improve their grade, suppress negative reviews, or receive preferential treatment in how community feedback is shown.

This separation between commercial relationships and ratings integrity is fundamental to what makes EMSGrades credible and useful.

A minimum number of reviews is required before a letter grade is displayed, to ensure that grades reflect a meaningful sample of experience rather than a single outlier review. The specific threshold will be published when the platform launches. Until that threshold is reached, a profile will display individual reviews without an aggregate grade.

Yes. Our grading methodology applies a recency weighting that gives more influence to reviews submitted in the past 12 to 24 months than to older reviews. This reflects the reality that agencies and providers change over time, and that a review from several years ago may not accurately reflect current conditions.

Older reviews remain visible on the platform and contribute to the overall grade, but with reduced weight relative to more recent experience.