FARMINGTON – Hospital officials announced Thursday plans to develop a single regional ambulance service to provide coverage to towns from Coburn Gore to Livermore.
Those towns are now covered by five separate ambulance services owned by Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington. The hospital bought the region’s ambulance services during the last eight years, mostly at the request of towns. Those services are LifeStar, Community Emergency Services, AMPS, Rangeley Ambulance and Sugarloaf Ambulance and Rescue.
“Over the next three months, the hospital will develop a new plan for emergency medical services for the region,” hospital President Richard Batt said. “We are looking toward a single regional program with one name, one set of policies and procedures, one governance structure, and one type of contract with area towns.”
Hospital officials met with municipal and county officials, Emergency Medical Services Advisory Board members and staff Thursday at the hospital.
Subject to approval by the towns and municipalities, the hospital wants to implement the new plan July 1, 2005.
Hospital officials said they would develop a plan that would protect the quality services now provided and create efficiencies that will keep the ambulance services financially viable.
In the last fiscal year, which ended June 30, the ambulance service network had a total loss of $732,678.
Batt cited decreases and changes in state and federal reimbursements for rural ambulance services as the major cause for the deficit.
In most cases, hospital Vice President Jill Berry Bowen said, the state and federal programs designed to pay for medical services such as ambulance care do not cover the full cost of the care.
That means that many ambulance runs have an operating loss, she said.
The towns’ subsidies help pay for the ambulance services, but the funds do not cover the cost of operating all the ambulance services.
“We’re not going to make a profit, that’s not our goal,” said Darryl Brown, member of the Franklin Memorial Hospital Board. “We want to break even.”
Town officials in the LifeStar and Community Emergency Services area walked away with checks for their share of profits the ambulance services had in their region. But towns covered by Rangeley, AMPS and Sugarloaf services received a bill for additional money owed for services.
Farmington Town Manager Dick Davis had a check for $23,321.28 for his town, which is nearly half of the LifeStar’s profit of $57,517.
The town’s share of Community Emergency Service’s profit was $20,078.
For the towns covered by AMPS, the deficit is $8,389. In the Rangeley service area, the towns owe a combined $42,358; the towns in the Sugarloaf area owe a total of $71,830.
Berry Bowen said numbers are accruing for the current fiscal year, as well.
It cost $4 million overall to provide ambulance service in the coverage area last year, Batt said, and if the deficit were only $50,000, it wouldn’t be bad. Under the new plan, the hospital would earn the profit and absorb the loss. The profit would go into a special ambulance account. The towns would still need to pay subsidies, Batt said, but they would be lower.
She said that when the federal government changed the way rural ambulance services are reimbursed, the services with shorter runs and more runs were reimbursed more than the services that have longer runs and fewer calls.
Although hospital officials said before they acquired the separate ambulance services that each entity would keep its name and that they would never be combined into one service, Batt said reimbursement changes couldn’t be predicted.
The government had used the same formula for 25 years, he said, and it was changed four years ago.
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