The Bella Vista Fire Department continues to man the front lines of the community paramedicine movement in northwest Arkansas, and it does so unflinchingly because it believes the program can be both a cost saver and a money maker.
The CP program, which started in 2015, is tailored after programs that popped up in isolated areas of Alaska and Maine where Emergency Medical Servicers filled the gap between home health and long, sometimes unnecessary trips to the hospital.
Travel time is not an issue in northwest Arkansas, but the BVFD, situated in an area with a large population of elderly residents, began to believe there had to be a way to cut down on unnecessary ambulance trips to the hospital, especially for those who had just been released from the hospital.
The BVFD said it would regularly get calls to help patients who had just fallen or were experiencing complications and uncertainty regarding ongoing illnesses.
Sometimes, the BVFD discovered, patients were calling to be taken to the hospital because they didn’t have the knowledge or resources to carry out their at-home care as directed by their doctors.
EMS personnel often discovered that callers had missed their follow-up appointments because they didn’t have reliable transportation, didn’t take their medications in the proper dosages, were eating poorly or not at all and were falling over rugs that were not properly anchored.
The CP program was jump-started by a grant from Mercy Health, which allowed for the training and certification of CPs, and matured into a pilot program for Humana Health in 2018
BVFD, which now has six, on-duty state-licensed CPs, said there has been a significant decrease in 30-day admission rates to local hospitals and those types of calls, saving the city money by reallocating resources and helping to decrease the overall cost of health care.
The BVFD said it is working toward billing Medicare and private insurance carriers for its services, while acquiring data proving that the CP program is a good deal for insurance companies as well.
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