The Janesville Gazette
JANESVILLE, Wis. — City and fire officials are calling a new program that transports patients from Janesville hospitals to facilities up to 90 miles away an “early success.”
The Janesville Fire Department provided 59 trips to facilities outside Janesville from February through April, exceeding the 12 to 16 trips per month the department expected.
Transports have been dispatched to 11 facilities in Madison, Milwaukee, Rockford and four other municipalities, according to a Gazette analysis of data provided by the fire department.
Prior to February, the fire department ferried patients between medical facilities only within Janesville city limits.
The service, which is on the hook to net the city $245,000, was heavily scrutinized during city council budget sessions last fall out of concern the program would lead to burnout among employees or leave Janesville stranded with too few ambulances.
Fire Chief Randy Banker said that hasn’t been a problem so far.
The transports are conducted by off-duty personnel and nobody is ever forced into them, he said. The ambulances used are also pulled out of reserve, leaving the city with a standard amount of two to four ambulances available.
Banker said the department has had to turn down requests for out-of-city trips, but he wasn’t sure how often that happened.
But the program hasn’t been without at least one instance of growing pains.
During the service’s debut month, a lack of familiarity with the program’s rules led to an ambulance transporting a patient from Mercy Hospital and Trauma Center to a skilled nursing facility in Evansville, Deputy Fire Chief Jim Ponkauskas said.
Ponkauskas said the program isn’t supposed to transfer patients to those kinds of facilities.
“This is a work in progress,” Banker said. “But I think this is a successful service.”
Fifty-four out of 59 out-of-city transports came from the two Mercy Health System facilities in Janesville, according to fire department data. Madison is the most frequent destination, with five facilities combining for 39 transports. Twenty-four of those went to UW Hospital.
Forty-one of the transports took place between noon and midnight. Twenty-one patients suffered from “general illness,” the most common ailment. That was followed by 13 patients with “behavioral/psychiatric disorder,” according to Gazette analysis of the data.
In a written statement, Mercy Vice President Barb Bortner said nine out of 10 critical patients in the area are brought to the Mercy Hospital and Trauma Center. Out of those, some need to be transferred because of insurance coverage and others for specialized care, she said.
The fire department charges the hospital of departure $17 per mile, along with flat fees of $975 for non-Janesville residents and $850 for residents.
The program’s 59 round trips come to roughly 4,577 miles traveled, which would equal $270,000 in mileage. Flat fees for the 59 trips would total between $50,150 and $57,525, depending on how many residents and non-residents were transported.
Only four out-of-city transports departed from St. Mary’s Janesville Hospital.
One came out of Beloit Memorial Hospital. On that occasion, a Janesville Fire Department ambulance picked up a patient at the Beloit facility and transported her to St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, according to the fire department.
Debbie Bruns, an administrative assistant for the fire department, said that transport involved a bariatric patient that required a specific ambulance that was unavailable at the time in Beloit, so the Janesville Fire Department stepped in.
Banker is a proponent for increased collaboration across jurisdictions. He acknowledged the program’s potential for adding another revenue stream for the city, but he also described it as a success from the standpoint of keeping people in the Janesville area safe.
“It’s a service protecting all of us in the Janesville area,” he said.
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