Greece Volunteer Ambulance to merge with CHS Mobile Integrated Healthcare

Greece Volunteer Ambulance soon will become part of CHS Mobile Integrated Healthcare Inc., the not-for-profit ambulance service that reaches Chili, Henrietta, Scottsville and Caledonia. The merger should take place in early 2020.

CHS Chief Reg Allen said the two services began talking six or seven months ago about ways to cut costs while maximizing personnel, what he called their “most valuable” asset.

“There’s a national shortage of EMTs and paramedics,” Allen said. “We’re in the same boat as everybody else. So we’ve got to start having those discussions and that led to, what would it look like if we merged?”

The two agencies put together a team to perform due diligence and look at operations and finance. The group found that a merger would be beneficial for both organizations and the boards voted in favor of moving forward.

“Unfortunately, ambulance services are going through a difficult time because of the way healthcare is funded,” said Allen, who is a member of the board of directors of the American Ambulance Association, a group that is working with the National Association of EMTs to change legislation on how ambulance services get paid.

Because not all injuries or illnesses that are called in to 911 require emergency room treatment, ambulance transportation is not necessary, thus the agency does not get paid. Ambulance services receive insurance payments as a result of transportation to an emergency department or trauma center.

Some towns use taxes to underwrite ambulance services.

“Not all towns support us financially, so that’s somewhat of a problem,” Allen said. “But we’re trying to change that dynamic at the federal level so that when an ambulance shows up they get paid for the service they provide. The funding streams that we have to deal with are part of the problem.”

Allen is not new to ambulance mergers. Henrietta, Chili and Scottsville merged to form CHA in January 2017. Caledonia joined the CHS family in March 2018, he said. The merger with Greece will bring synergies in the agencies’ billing and payroll methods, enabling the ambulance services to cut costs.

CHS has a dozen emergency vehicles that are capable of moving between the four regions covered by the service. Greece has about eight, Allen said. Bringing Greece on board will only improve service to area residents, he said.

“When we merged with Chili and Scottsville our call coverage—in other words, the calls that we covered in Henrietta with Henrietta resources—was almost 98 percent and our response times were well within the specifications set by the county medical director,” Allen explained. “How are you going to improve that? That sounds pretty good. They actually improved it to 99 percent.”

Prior to merging, Caledonia had high response times because the town had too little funding to pay for more than one crew. When that crew was on a call there was nobody to backfill it, Allen noted.

“We have enough ambulances to move people around, so we’re able to cover the area with low response times because we can move some of our resources that aren’t on calls around,” he said. “And that’s really the trick, maximizing your resources.”

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