Pulsara goes to the World Cup: Supporting Medical Response with Connected Communication

With record-breaking crowds filling stadiums across North America, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is proving to be one of the largest sporting events in history. Attendance has reached an astounding 99.7% of stadium capacity across all matches, with more than 4.6 million recorded attendants in the first 72 matches alone. This year’s 16 host cities are each being flooded with hundreds of thousands of visiting soccer fans who are gathering for fan celebration events, watch parties, and live matches.

Events of this scale place extraordinary demands on local medical infrastructure. From on-site EMS crews and event medical staff to receiving hospitals and public safety agencies, responders must coordinate care across multiple organizations while managing high patient volumes. Traditional communication methods can leave teams working with fragmented information, making it harder to maintain a clear operational picture.

In the first month of World Cup matches and fan events, organizations leveraging Pulsara have seen incredible benefits for individual patient care and for regional resource management.

“Since the start of FIFA FanFest operations, Pulsara has become an integral component of our medical coordination strategy,” Kansas City Fire Department (KCFD) shared in a statement from Division Chief Ariel Seelig and Deputy Chief Mark Little. “The platform has provided unprecedented visibility into patient movement, resource utilization, and operational activity while simultaneously connecting field personnel, command staff, emergency management partners, hospitals, and event organizers through a single shared platform.”

Replacing Old Workflows

In Kansas City, Missouri, organizations like KCFD, KC Medical EMS, and the Missouri State Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) are using Pulsara to streamline communication between disparate teams in the field and with local hospitals. Medical crews at FIFA matches and fan activities can instantly share patient information with downstream care teams, maintaining a single source of truth and shared awareness across the entire event.

“Prior to implementing Pulsara, much of our patient coordination relied on face-to-face
communication, radio traffic, and separate information streams between field providers,
command staff, and hospital partners. While those systems remain important, Pulsara
has significantly enhanced our ability to share patient and operational information in real
time across the entire response system.” - KCFD

Kansas City organizations implemented Pulsara across the entire region ahead of the World Cup and FanFestival events. With limited preparation time, local and regional teams were trained on the platform rapidly and all participating organizations coordinated around a unified communication strategy.

According to a statement from Missouri DMAT officials, medical team members “were able to be instructed in the Pulsara operations within minutes and, over the course of the event, became very proficient in the operations.”

Trusted by Longtime Partners

For many organizations, utilizing Pulsara for World Cup events was a natural extension of how they already work. Texas organizations such as GMR have relied on Pulsara for years to coordinate with local hospital systems for everyday emergencies, mass casualty incidents, and large public events. Regional coordination centers like North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council (NCTTRAC) and SouthEast Texas Regional Advisory Council (SETRAC) are also using Pulsara to manage large-scale emergencies across their respective regions.

When FIFA brought World Cup events to Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, these organizations were ready with established  Pulsara workflows to manage medical response for the massive influx of tourists and sports fans. Medics are using patient wristband scanning for rapid triage and effective patient tracking between organizations, and a new missing person form leverages the Pulsara API to locate and reunite patients across the entire region.

Sharing one clear operating picture, Texas EMS crews, hospitals, and regional organizers can effectively monitor patient volumes and manage resources to best serve the stadiums and venues where fans are gathering to watch their favorite teams.

Preparing for the Matches Ahead

As millions of fans continue to gather for the remaining matches and celebrations, effective medical coordination remains essential. With massive crowds straining infrastructure, host cities are putting their communication and logistics systems to the test in front of a global stage.

Medical organizations across host regions like Kansas City, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth are working hard to maintain consistent, organized systems of care throughout the chaos of World Cup events. By connecting responders, improving situational awareness, and streamlining patient tracking, Pulsara is helping teams stay aligned so they can focus on delivering timely care when it matters most.

Want to learn more about how Pulsara is changing medical communication across entire systems of care? Check out A Decade of Proven Results: 20 Research Studies that Demonstrate Pulsara’s Impact.