City and county officials have agreed on a contract that Columbus Regional Hospital’s EMS service will provide 911 emergency ambulance service to all areas of Bartholomew County through at least 2024.
On Monday, the Bartholomew County Commissioners approved an extension of a four-year agreement that emerged out of last week’s annual meeting of the Emergency Ambulance Services Board. The Columbus Board of Public Works and Safety approved the agreement on Tuesday.
Mary Ferdon, the city’s executive director of administration and community development, said that after receiving the city’s approval, the agreement will go to Columbus Regional Health for final signatures.
There has been no agreement for the past three months because preparation of the four-year-extension was slowed down by the COVID-19 virus, Ferdon said.
A key provision in the agreement calls for the hospital’s EMS service to provide 911 emergency ambulances and, in some cases, personnel at Columbus Fire Station 1 at 11th and Washington, Station 5 on Goeller Court, Columbus Township Fire and Rescue on Repp Drive and at the hospital’s EMS headquarters on Central Avenue.
These ambulances and EMS personnel will respond whenever they are dispatched by the Bartholomew County Emergency Operations 911 Center, the agreement states.
In return, the city agrees to provide certain equipment, facilities and assistance, including lodgings and other amenities for CRH emergency medical technicians at Fire Stations 1 and 5, the agreement states. It was emphasized Monday that tax money will not be used for payment of any services.
The agreement, which originated in the 1980s, has grown over the years to cover areas such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), confidential records, warranties, insurance, data collection, third party payments and security against legal liability.
While attorneys for the city, county and hospital did make alterations to the agreement this year, there are very few content changes, Ferdon said.
A new provision does allow for electronic signatures, as well as placing county auditor Pia O’Connor and county commissioner Tony London on the Emergency Ambulance Service Board.
While the board only meets once a year, there is also an Oversight Committee that gets together every three months. This group includes top officials with the hospital’s emergency services division, professional and volunteer fire departments, the director of the Emergency Operations 911 Center, and a high-ranking official with the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department. Their job is to measure how well the ambulances and first responders are performing.
Although the goal of the ambulance is to respond to 90% of all runs in less than nine minutes, personnel exceeded that goal at 90.4%, Ferdon announced.
For the county, the goal was to respond to 90% of all runs in less than 18 minutes. Once again, the hospital ambulances beat the goal last year with 91.1% success, she said.
There was "a little bit of difference in some of the response times" of both ambulances and the fire department in the past year, but added that there were "good explanations" for those deviations, Ferdon said.
Last year, first responders began talking about how to reduce the number of emergency units called to an accident scene where nobody was injured, Ferdon said. These discussions are likely to result in some protocol changes this year, she said.
