By Alex Gault
Watertown Daily Times
ALBANY, N.Y. — On Wednesday, Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul signed two bills into law that will dramatically expand the ability for emergency medical services to provide care to patients at home or transport them to a treatment center other than a hospital emergency room.
By signing the two bills into law, Hochul made changes to state regulations that have for years restricted how ambulances and EMS providers can serve their clients. Historically, ambulance operators have only been empowered to collect a patient and deliver them to a hospital emergency room for treatment and were only permitted to bill patients when they bring them to an emergency room.
EMS advocates have argued that’s over-restrictive — putting an undue burden on ambulance staff to bring as many patients to hospital emergency rooms as possible. In a time when hospital emergency rooms are overstressed, with long wait times and low staffing counts, they’ve pushed for years to change the system.
Under one bill signed Wednesday, an ambulance provider is now able to bill Medicaid and other insurance plans when they treat a patient in their home and don’t transport them. That can include administering insulin to a diabetic, stabilizing an oxygen-dependent patient or other incidents when the patient refuses or doesn’t require hospital care. It also permits those operators to bill Medicaid when they transport a patient to another kind of healthcare facility, like an urgent care office, a primary care physician or a specialist’s office.
A second bill signed Wednesday gives ambulance and advanced life support providers the ability to store and provide patients with blood transfusions when necessary. While air ambulance services that use planes or helicopters have long been empowered to provide blood transfusions, ground-based services have not. Advocates say having the ability to provide transfusions to patients en route to the emergency room will save lives.
The United New York Ambulance Network, an advocate for EMS providers across New York, thanked the governor for signing these bills into law.
“It will ensure ambulance service providers are finally paid for providing care they were not previously reimbursed for, like treating patients at the scene of an injury, facilitating telemedicine, or taking people to specialized care like a mental health facility,” said UNYAN President Timothy P. Egan, who runs an EMS service in Rockland County. “This new law means emergency medical services will be more readily available, especially in rural and medically underserved areas where EMS is the frontline of healthcare.”
Egan said he expects the extra income for providers from the ability to bill for more services will mean more hiring of staff and better long-term outlooks for the industry, which for years has been saying that their business model is unprofitable. Long-term low reimbursement rates for Medicare-covered patients, which represent a majority of EMS patients in New York, has meant that many services don’t make enough money to support themselves, relying on volunteers, donations or tax-base support to remain operable.
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