It's been a year since the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District added advanced medical providers to its list of first responders. It's a sign of the times nationwide.
Scott Perryman is a battalion chief with Metro Fire.
"I started in Southern California as paramedic," he said.
Perryman loved medicine so much, he put himself through physician assistant school at Stanford. When he went back out into the field, he realized "that there were a lot of issues I was seeing as a paramedic that could be treated in the field and they didn't have to go to the emergency room."
A lot of 9-1-1 calls were for something as simple as medication, so he decided to pilot a program in Sacramento where physician assistants or nurse practitioners accompany the paramedic. "The beauty of that is it saves the patient from going into the emergency room and spending resources there," Perryman said.