By Suzanne Hoholik
The Columbus Dispatch
CINCINATTI — This scenario is happening more often: A medical helicopter tries to bring a patient to an Ohio hospital but the landing pad is occupied.
Workers inside the hospital rush to locate the pilot to move the parked chopper, a delay that can take 15 minutes. Meanwhile, the incoming helicopter circles overhead with a patient who needs care.
This scenario recently happened three times in a week’s span in Cincinnati. The problem is communication.
Pilots may talk to each other when they pass in the air, “but they may not know that there are two helicopters on a hospital landing pad already or that one is getting ready to take off because they’re not talking to our communications center,” said Teri Grau, clinical director of Air Care & Mobile Care in Cincinnati.
She said this is happening more since two air-medical companies have moved into Ohio. She said despite reminders, the new companies aren’t talking on the same frequencies as other helicopter programs.
Life Air, based in Portsmouth, set up a helicopter based in Chillicothe this month. Air Evac Lifeteam set up a base in East Liverpool last year, and it also sometimes flies into Ohio from locations in surrounding states.
Dr. Wayne Wheeler, medical director of Life Air, said his pilots communicate with other air-medical programs when they fly into their areas. He said the complaints are part of an effort to quash the growing competition.
In 2005, there were eight medical-helicopter companies with a combined 25 helicopters in Ohio. Now, there are now 12 companies that have 59 helicopters licensed to fly in the state. Federal air-traffic controllers monitor large planes, but there’s no central dispatcher keeping track of the medical helicopters in Ohio or any state.
“It would be like you telling the police you’re driving to the supermarket,” said Tony Molinaro, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
“They fly just like any small plane, see and be seen, unless they’re near an airport.”
The Ohio Medical Transportation Board inspects and issues licenses for the helicopters but doesn’t keep track of their whereabouts.
With the continued growth in the air-medical industry, Grau and some of her colleagues want this to change. They want a state dispatcher and air-traffic controller for medical helicopters.
“We have latent risks out there due to the system that’s evolved, and we’re not taking actions appropriate to end those risks,” said Rod Crane, president of MedFlight of Ohio, based in Columbus.
He said there have been a lot of “close calls” and wants to create an authority to keep track of medical helicopters.
The goal, Crane said, is to avoid what happened in Flagstaff, Ariz., last year, where two helicopters collided near a hospital. Six people, including two patients, died.
He said he proposed the idea of a new government body to oversee medical helicopters to a state lawmaker, but Crane wouldn’t say who.
Leaders of the health committees in the Ohio Senate and House had not heard of the idea. But both said the air-medical industry should try to solve the problem on its own before expanding government.
The president of the Ohio Association of Critical Care Transport said private companies are unlikely to work together.
“You’d need government involved, it would have to be a state mandate,” said Tom Allenstein, also the chief clinical officer at MedFlight.
Wheeler, the Life Air official, said Crane and other hospital-funded programs across the state are trying to gain control over the market.
“A central dispatch gives a person enough power over his competition,” Wheeler said.
“The real bottom line is -- we’ll support it as long as the central dispatch was in Portsmouth, Ohio, instead of Columbus, Ohio.”
Copyright 2009 The Columbus Dispatch