DENVER -- Emergency ambulance response from Denver Health Medical Center is failing to meet obligations to the citizens, according to Denver's auditor.

Auditor Dennis Gallagher formally presented the findings to the city's audit committee on Thursday. Click here to read a pdf file of the audit.

Officials with Denver Health said the hospital has the best trauma survival rate in the United States and it must focus primarily on clinical outcomes, not response times.

"The auditor says your response times don't meet standards and they need to improve. Will you improve the response times of your paramedic unit?" CALL7 Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked Denver Health CEO Patricia Gabow.

Gabow said, "I think what you heard from the audit report is that response time is not a very good reflection of performance of the system."

"That's not what I heard," said Kovaleski who continued, "I heard from the auditor that the response time is not meeting what the city needs and what the community needs. So will you improve that response time?"

"I think we need to work with the city to get good patient outcomes," said Gabow.

The audit follows a series of CALL7 Investigative reports that exposed a number of failures in the city's emergency ambulance response.

Earlier this year, one paramedic told 7NEWS that patients were waiting as long as 15 minutes for an ambulance and that "sometimes in Denver you would be a lot better off driving yourself to the hospital."

7NEWS also found the hospital does not station an ambulance at Denver International Airport even though it is the nation's fifth-busiest airport and has hundreds of emergency ambulance calls a year.

The nation's top four airports all have ambulances on site.

While DIA does have paramedics stationed in the airport, patients who need emergency room care have waited as long as 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

The audit released Thursday lists "three general areas of deficiency" with the city's emergency medical response system, including confusion as to exactly when an emergency call begins.

The audit said the contract between the hospital and city has "significant weaknesses" and "two ambiguous 'clock start time' points for the emergency response measurement."

The audit goes on to say, "Denver Health is currently adhering to a third 'clock start time' point that is less restrictive."

Gallagher also points to a lack of city oversight for emergency medical response and inefficiencies with call processing at Denver's 911 center.

"I was dissappointed with the response of Denver Health which sort of implied, 'we're the Doctors, we know,'" said Gallagher.

"Do you feel like Denver Health has essentially snubbed your audit?" asked Kovaleski.

Gallagher answered, "Well that's a great way to put it ... I would say yes, I think they indeed snubbed our audit and think it was very unfortunate."

Denver paramedic Bob Petre told 7NEWS, "[The audit] suggested some hard parameters and I don't think Denver Health wants to be held to hard parameters. I think if you are going to serve the community that's what you have to do."

In a written response, Denver Health officials said the paramedic division lost $1.6 million in 2007, leaving the hospital to subsidize the service and "Denver Health and the City have begun to collaboratively review prospective changes that could help ... the Emergency Medical Services System perform even better, including enhanced data sharing, streamlining of the 911 dispatch system, improved identification of true like-threatening emergencies, and expanding citizen training in CPR and AED use."