The medical problems categorized by HEMS personnel can be seen as valid. The greatest challenges remain in the classification of stroke and other neurological emergencies. Patients treated by HEMS personnel are characterized by significant heterogeneity and the crude classification based on the reporting template should be used cautiously in scientific research.

A total of 33,844 patients were included in the analyses.

All the medical problem categories included a broad spectrum of ICD-10 diagnoses (the number of diagnosis classes per medical problem category ranged from 73 to 403).

The most frequent diagnoses were mainly consistent with the reported medical problems. Overlapping of ICD-10 diagnoses was mostly seen in two medical problem categories: stroke and acute neurology excluding stroke.

Additionally, typical patient characteristics and disturbances in vital signs were related to adequate medical problem categories.

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