A Growing EMS Community

You might say that Michigan-based Community EMS is like TV's Energizer bunny: It just keeps on going--and growing. The company got its start back in 1982 at Botsford Hospital in Farmington, MI, and has grown into five ambulance companies with joint venture partnerships with a number of larger healthcare delivery systems to become the largest not-for-profit prehospital care provider in the state. In mid-March, Community EMS and Ohio-based MedFlight forged a new organization, MedCare Ambulance, which, according to President/CEO Greg Beauchemin, will be the first ground and air joint venture partnership in the country between two not-for-profit organizations.

"Back in the early '80s, our CEO visioned that prehospital care was part of the whole healthcare delivery system and that quality and total patient experience start from onset of illness and injury all the way through treatment, discharge and rehab," says Beauchemin. "He decided to be one of the first health systems in the country to get into the EMS business. Over the years, Community EMS has grown by leaps and bounds. We transport more than 500 patients a day out of our communications center, and we use state-of-the-art technology to manage that large demand, which ranges from 9-1-1 all the way through nonemergent discharge, transportation and movement of critical care patients from hospital to hospital. All of our companies are CAAS-accredited, which we're very proud of."

The technology Beauchemin refers to is truly high-tech.

"We are a completely voiceless and paperless communications center and track all of our resources by satellite," he says. "We use a split-screen plasma TV in the back of our vehicles, where one side of the screen shows the patient's vital signs and the other is a digitized map of the earth's surface, so the caregiver in the back of the rig can see exactly where they are in relation to the hospital where they're taking a patient, and the physician at the receiving end can go onto the Internet and see the same thing the medics are seeing.

"One of the things you hear now relative to emergency angioplasty is door-to-balloon," Beauchemin continues. "Well, we're starting to think about scene-to-balloon time: how we can reduce scene to balloon and what impact that will have on patient outcome. We've been transmitting 12-lead EKG data to hospitals electronically and that's had a tremendous impact on our door-to-balloon target time of less than 40 minutes. We can hook a patient up while we're still on scene, so the physician can see what we're seeing, and we believe that will further reduce the critical time when the patient needs treatment."

About 10 years ago, Community EMS realized that healthcare delivery systems continue to be responsible for patients after hospital discharge, and transportation plays a large role in home healthcare and nursing facility transfers.

"That led us to enter the medical logistics consulting business, and we started a new company called Parastar," says Beauchemin. "Parastar is a for-profit subsidiary that primarily does consulting for hospital systems, but also works with fire service EMS on system design and support services. Through our consulting business, we've rolled out joint venture partnerships not only in Michigan, but we have three in Ohio, one each in Kentucky, Texas and Illinois, and soon to be one in Florida. Through our partnership, we take an original cost center like transportation and turn it into a profit center, which in turn helps them provide community services like CPR training and other benefits.

"We're a very efficient organization," Beauchemin adds. "We run high utilization of our resources, and, although we do generate earnings, we reinvest those earnings back into the company rather than giving them to investors or shareholders. We have the largest training program in the state of Michigan, called Life Support Training Institute, and we have an in-house IT staff that works with our employees to make sure they're using the technology appropriately and following best practices. Once the learning curve has been dealt with, we find we don't have to put as much time into training and can put more time into analyzing the data."

Last fall, because of his expertise in using wireless technology, Beauchemin was invited to Beijing, China, to speak at a conference on disaster management. "Many of the attendees at the conference live in remote areas where they don't have the ability to even communicate with first responders, so sharing ideas with them on a collaborative basis was a great opportunity," he says. "I've also worked with government officials in India on improving their 911 system design, and we're having discussions about helping some countries in the Middle East to improve their antiquated EMS response system."

Now that Community EMS/Parastar has entered the aeromedical field and spread its wings internationally, it doesn't look like they'll be slowing down anytime soon. For more information on their organization, visit https://www.communityems.org.