Calls routed through new provider since May; cities fight loss of control
By Inga Miller
The Modesto Bee (California)
Copyright 2006 The Modesto Bee
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
San Joaquin County’s new ambulance provider is getting to calls faster, according to a report that goes to the Board of Supervisors today.
It shows that American Medical Response’s ambulances met the county’s requirement of being on time 90 percent of the time in July on average and were on time 90.82 percent of the time in August. That compared with 77.26 percent in May and 87.75 percent in June.
Still, the company faces about $36,600 in fines for July and $38,400 for August for those times it was late and for slower response times in some, mostly rural areas in and around Stockton, outside Lodi, and in Tracy.
“You will almost never have a month without penalties because the standard is so high,” said Dan Burch, administrator of the San Joaquin County Emergency Medical Services Agency. “So they can’t be at every call 100 percent of the time, or that would be our performance standard.”
The company gets charged $10 per minute when it is late. And it was slapped with $5,000 penalties for every area where its average fell to less than 90 percent.
Burch said lags are pretty common for ambulance companies taking over new areas.
The contract that took effect in May ignited a fight over emergency dispatch and response times.
Manteca has its own ambulance service, Manteca District Ambulance. Even so, the county ordered that all ambulance calls be routed through AMR’s Lifecom dispatch center in Salida, a move Manteca, Lodi and Stockton are resisting in court because they want to keep control of their calls. The legal battle will go back to San Joaquin Superior Court on Nov. 16.
Manteca Fire Chief George Quaresma contends that after the new system started, ambulances were taking an average 1 and a half minutes longer than usual to get to their destinations, and firefighters would take that much longer if the city went along with the system.
That’s because the computer systems weren’t linked until September, and state law dictates that 911 calls be transferred one time only to keep callers from falling onto a merry-go-round.
Calls first come into local police departments. The county requires that the one transfer now be made to AMR. But Manteca, still under the old system, is continuing to send its calls to Stockton, where a dispatcher alerts Manteca firefighters.
Because AMR wasn’t linked into the system until September, ambulances had to rely on information called in manually from Stockton. Had Manteca turned over its dispatching to AMR, Quaresma said, the fire department would have been the one to get that slower information.
Firefighters typically had arrived about 1 and a half minutes before ambulances when AMR took over, according to Quaresma. After AMR took over, the fire department was arriving 3 minutes faster.
Jason Sorrick, a spokesman for AMR, blamed the antiquated system for some delays, and said the company has made changes to place its ambulances better and add staff and ambulances.
The contract calls for these response times: urban areas, 7:29minutes; suburban, 9:29; rural, 17:29; and wilderness, 29:29.
In August, the mean response times ranged from 4:26 minutes for urban areas to 8:06 for suburban areas, 11:19 in rural areas and 13:09 in wilderness areas.
“We’re working closely with EMS to only improve the system,” Sorrick said. “We plan to maintain compliance and hopefully, as more data comes in, we can improve.”