A number of Baton Rouge area hospitals have approached the city-parish Department of Emergency Medical Services with a partnership proposal to help reduce the number of unnecessary and costly emergency room visits.
The Metro Council is to introduce a pair of agenda items next week that would allow EMS to enter into service agreements with local hospitals. Interim EMS Administrator Chad Guillot says under such agreements, the hospitals would refer patients who routinely turn up at the emergency room with non-life threatening conditions to EMS, which in turn would provide in-home services and would be reimbursed by the hospitals.
“These are patients who don’t qualify for home health care … who don’t have the resources to have a primary care physician look after them, and what happens is they’re using 911 and the ER as an entry to the hospital,” Guillot explains. “What we’re trying to do is take some pressure off of the 911 dispatchers, EMS and the hospitals, because it’s very costly and the ER waits are just huge.”
Guillot says EMS staff would consult with the patients at their homes or over the phone to ensure they’re properly taking medications, to check on their conditions and to help schedule medical appointments, among other things.
“It will save us some costs, too, because we’ll be sending paramedics out in a support vehicle rather than an ambulance,” he says. “And a lot of the times it could be as simple as a phone consultation.”
Guillot says EMS launched a small pilot program in partnership with one local hospital in August, and it has proved successful.
“Our numbers are good,” he says. “So far we’ve been able to keep several patients out of the ER. We want to start this out small with just a couple of local hospitals and then gradually ramp it up.”
Guillot says no additional EMS staff will be needed due to the partnerships. If the Metro Council approves the agenda items for introduction at its meeting Wednesday, the items would be up for a vote at the council’s Jan. 28 meeting. —Steve Sanoski
