West Allis is one of the five departments in the county involved in the program designed to prevent patients from frequently calling 911 for problems that can be better handled with improved care, CBS 58 reports.

The department makes home visits to 29 patients. In 2013, those patients accounted for 857 911 calls, 596 ER visits and 571 ambulance unit hours. Since starting the home visit program in January 2015, none of the patients have called 911.

After 90 days, the department plans to review the results of the program.

Source: CBS 58 Milwaukee

By Jerry Biggart, Chairman, Wisconsin EMS Advisory Board

For a lot of EMS providers, it’s difficult to imagine an entire country not having a single ambulance. But until August 2014 that was a reality in the West African nation of Burkina Faso.

Now, after not having a single ambulance to serve its population of 17 million until a few months ago, Burkina Faso, a country about eh size of Colorado, will soon be receiving a second, thanks to a donation from Ryan Brothers Ambulance Service, based in Madison, WI, in December.

The windfall for Burkina Faso can be largely traced to two people: Hassimi Traore and Dawn Kiernan.

Traore, a chemistry professor at the university of Wisconsin-Whitewater, is a native of Burkina Faso. When he just 12 years old, he witnessed his best friend, his “brother,” get hit by a car hit by a car in his home village of Dédougou. There is no 9-1-1 system in Burkina Faso, so the only way to a clinic or hospital was to walk or, at the time, go by a cart pulled by livestock. Because Traore’s friend was unable to reach a clinic, he died.

Traore told himself that one day he would help his village so people wouldn’t have to die because there was no way to get to a hospital.

To fulfill this vow, in 2011 Traore purchased a 1990 Ford ambulance. It took him three years to pay it off with his own money. That was the ambulance that was delivered to Burkina Faso in August.

It was while he was raising funds to get the ambulance and medical supplies over to Africa that Traore was introduced to Kiernan, an EMT in Whitewater. Kiernan helped send out nearly 700 letters asking for assistance with the endeavor, one of which landed in the lap of Ryan Brothers co-owner Patrick Ryan.

Ryan notes company policy dictates once a vehicle hits 200,000 miles it can longer be used to transport patients. “Normally we’d remount it, but this time I remembered that letter I’d received,” Ryan says. “I thought, let’s just get a new one and donate this ambulance.”

In addition to the ambulance, Ryan Brothers donated a variety of back-up medical equipment and supplies to stock the rig. And when it starts its new life in Burkina Faso this spring, it will bring a little Wisconsin with it as a reminder of where it came from.

“All of the Ryan Brothers decals will remain on the ambulance,” says Kiernan. “The one we took over in August even still has its Wisconsin license plate.”

Sorely Needed

To say the new ambulance will be a benefit to the people of Burkina Faso is an understatement.

According to Kiernan, Burkina Faso’s only hospital is staffed by just six doctors—three general practitioners, one OB/GYN, one pediatrician and one surgeon. The first ambulance serves an area with a population of about 1.8 million people. Since August, it’s already transported about 500 patients, people who might never have made it to the hospital previously.

Kiernan was able to accompany the first ambulance on its trip to Burkina Faso with a group of volunteers, though the group hit a snag when the ambulance got waylaid in Ghana. “We’d hoped to do some training with the staff in Dédougou, but with our supplies unavailable we couldn’t do as much as we wanted.”

Still, Kiernan, who says she’s found a friend for life in Traore, plans to return to Burkina Faso with another group to continue the work she’s started. There, Kiernan and her colleagues will be able to provide more extensive EMS training and provide some much-needed assistance in an area where medical supplies and manpower are often scarce. “We’ll go back over once the threat of Ebola has truly subsided. Our goal is to bring other EMTs, stay in Dédougou and work in the hospital for a couple weeks.”

Source: Jason Busch is an associate editor for EMS World.

Guest:  Dr. Steve Stroman, Medical Director at Eagle III, Oshkosh Fire, DePere Fire and Rescue, and Oconto Falls Area Ambulance

Over the years, I’ve seen local ambulance service medical directors engaged in policy, procedures, trainings, and quality improvement projects.  Unfortunately, we have medical directors at the other end of the spectrum who are never seen and their name not known by the people working under their MD license.

When Dr. Steve Stroman from the Green Bay area stood up at last September’s Paramedic Systems of Wisconsin Conference and rattled off over six or seven major initiatives they completed for the year, I listened in amazement.  In this webcast Dr. Stroman offers some great ideas from the medical director’s perspective, and projects they’ve recently completed that you can easily pick up on and do the same.

Topics covered, include:

>> Click here to listen now!

The goal is to have seven healthcare coalition regions established in Wisconsin by July 1, 2015.  The regions are determined by the Department of Health, and mirror the previous WHEPP regions, which had been established by patient referral patterns.

 

Wisconsin identified some gaps in widespread healthcare coordination, to include: coordinated plans for large scale disasters, lack of a formal regional medical coordination structure, established indicators for crisis standards when systems are overwhelmed, evacuation plans, and patient tracking capability.

 

Healthcare coalitions don’t replace day-to-day functions of individual responder agencies or organizations.  Wisconsin is following a federal model that grew out of recent event experiences with the Joplin tornado and Hurricane Sandy.  The goal is to coordinate how public health, healthcare institutions, and first responder agencies will manage their efforts to enact a uniform and unified response to an emergency, specifically the medical surge aspect of an event.

 

Get the latest information on Wisconsin’s Healthcare Coalition efforts in this webcast from co-medical advisor Dr. Michael Clark. Click here to listen  now!

MTM recently announced they will be holding three town hall meetings for their transportation partners.  They are inviting comment on the Wisconsin non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) program.

 

MTM, the state of Wisconsin’s non-emergency Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus transportation broker who schedules ambulance and other rides for medical appointments was recently criticized in a Journal Sentinel article for long wait times. 

 

The town hall meetings will be held in the West Milwaukee area on March 31; the Black River Falls/Tomah area on August 4; and the Green Bay/Appleton area on November 3. The West Milwaukee meeting is scheduled for the Pewaukee Holiday Inn from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Locations for the Black River Falls/Tomah and Green Bay/Appleton meetings are TBD and will be announced as the dates approach.

 

To RSVP, click here

The union for Green Bay firefighters has lost a nearly two-year fight against a city initiative requiring firefighters to make house calls on discharged hospital patients.

A state labor arbitrator has ruled the city was within its rights to initiate a program in which Bellin Hospital paid the city $50 for each house call.

But whether the so-called Hook and Ladder program will move forward in its original structure remains to be seen.

City officials suspended the program indefinitely while awaiting a decision on the grievance filed by the Green Bay Professional Fire Fighters Association.

The union argued that Hook and Ladder was an improper expansion of firefighters duties and that the city could not impose such new assignments unilaterally under the union's contract.

>> Read more

Source:  Green Bay Press Gazette

By Joe Covelli, PAAW Executive Director

 

At its January 8^th board of directors meeting, the Professional Ambulance Association of Wisconsin approved its 2015 – 2017 strategic work plan.  The plan was developed on December 1, 2014 when association members, staff, consultants, and invited guests attended the all-day meeting.

 

The top priority calls for continuing to build momentum gained last year and introduce legislation in the current session to expand TRIP – Taxpayer Refund Intercept Program.  Currently, only municipal ambulance services can access TRIP and file with the state to collect unpaid transport bills from the patient’s tax refund.  PAAW is working with legislators to introduce legislation that allow ambulance services contracted by a municipality to provide 911 services the same TRIP collection benefits for unpaid patient transports.  The reception by legislators to the idea has been favorable.

 

Additional items in the strategic work plan include community paramedicine, Medicaid reimbursement rates, ongoing communications, member growth, and advancing EMS leader networking opportunities.  The Wisconsin Stars of Life Awards Program will change to an every other year event, with the next one being held in September 2015, and one honoree from the group advancing to the national Stars of Life in Washington D.C. in March 2016.

The MedEvac Foundation International has approved grant funding for Dr. Daniel Patterson to investigate sleep-wake patterns and real-time fatigue reduction in emergency medical service (EMS) clinicians.

The medical transportation community requires that emergency care be available 24 hours per day. Shift work requires the prehospital emergency clinician to diverge from normal circadian sleep cycles and be alert when the pressure to sleep is greatest. While recent data suggests a link between sleep, fatigue and safety in the EMS setting, the data are limited to cross-sectional designs and subject to recall and measurement bias. The proposed study will provide detailed prospective observational data to address questions pertaining to the relationships between shift duration, sleep/wake cycles and behavioral alertness.

The overarching goal of the study is to address the Foundation’s research priority of “Educational techniques and technologies aimed at improving patient care, critical decision making, safety, or other areas pertinent to transport medicine.” Dr. Patterson, along with several colleagues, intends to accomplish this goal by performing a multi-site study of air-medical EMS clinicians. The Foundation Board has approved Phase 1 of the study, which will involve a prospective observational study of sleep/wake cycles, shift work duration, intershift recovery, fatigue and behavioral alertness (i.e., psychomotor vigilance).

The analysis of Phase 1 data will focus on differences between 12-hour versus 24-hour shifts.

>> Read more

MTM schedules non-emergency ambulance requests for Medicaid and BadgerCare

Inadequate staffing at MTM Inc.'s call center in Madison appears to be the reason why more than 24% of people who called to schedule a medical ride in September hung up before getting through to a person. That's according to MTM's corrective action plan, obtained by the Public Investigator under a public information request.

MTM provides rides to Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus members who have no other way to get to their plan-covered services. Its contract with the State of Wisconsin caps the number of hang-ups at 5%. But in 2014, rates steadily climbed from 10.3% in March to 24.1% in September. Meanwhile, state officials sat by without any enforcement.

That's because MTM's contract says the 5% hang-up limit isn't enforced until the average hold time exceeds four minutes. The company came in under that every month through August.

However, according to newly released statistics, hold times exceeded the four-minute limit in MTM's contract in September. This triggered enforcement of both the hang-up limit and the hold time.

>> Read more

Source:  JS Online