JAY – Franklin Memorial Hospital plans to create a task force to look at ambulance services and costs across the region.

The hospital operates five ambulance services to serve northern Androscoggin County, Franklin County and portions of Kennebec and Somerset counties.

The hospital is committed to providing “quality service” to its communities, Vice President Jill Berry-Bowen told Jay selectmen Tuesday night.

The hospital’s emergency medical services team has been working with the towns in its service areas to balance cost and services.

The services are continually challenged in reimbursements, Berry-Bowen said.

Lower reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid have resulted in the higher subsidies the towns pay for services.

The hospital is receiving less for the services it provides, she said.

For every dollar billed for ambulance services, it gets back 40 cents to 50 cents, she said.

In regard to Community Emergency Service, which serves Jay, Livermore and Livermore Falls, the cost of ambulance service for fiscal year 2005 is $138,332. That is for an on-call system rather than a staff system for the second ambulance, Berry-Bowen said.

“There is no fluff in the budget,” she said. “It’s equipment and people. The next step would be very difficult.”

About 50 percent of operation cost is labor, she said.

Berry-Bowen said a task force with representatives of all five services would meet and brainstorm ideas to see if there are opportunities to improve services across the region.

“We’ve got to do something to slow the cost of services,” Berry-Bowen said.

The hospital has exhausted all opportunities to “kind of shave and pare down” expenses, she said. The services are buying items together for savings, doing education together and other things to be more efficient.

AMPS, Sugarloaf and Rangeley ambulance services have a system in place where a paramedic is on call and acts as an interceptor, allowing a medic to respond to emergencies.

Dispatching is one area where a centralized system would save costs, she said.

Another issue is that all five ambulance services have different ways of calculating subsidies, Berry-Bowen said, some based on population, some on the number of runs.

One town in one coverage service cannot have a different calculation method than the others, she said. It has to work for all parties in that service, she said.

One idea to bring some consistency to subsidy calculation is to base one-third on population, one-third on town valuation and one-third on the number of runs, Berry-Bowen said.

The hospital will work with staff to look at options that could be floated at the task force meeting, she said.

The task force is expected to have its first meeting this summer with at least one person from each town and each service on the team.

The answer lies at the local level, she said.

“We’re going to do this,” Berry-Bowen said. “We’re in this for the long haul. We’re going to make it work. It’s an important service; we need to have this service.”

Copy the Story Link