EMS transition will increase local coverage

When you wake up on New Year’s Day -- or more precisely, the moment you kiss that special someone at the stroke of midnight Tuesday -- emergency medical coverage in Putnam County will have changed.

Don’t worry, if you dial 911 at 12:01 a.m., an ambulance will still arrive. The name of the service will have changed, though. Additionally, county officials hope the level of service will have improved.

With the start of 2020, Putnam County Operation Life, the non-profit ambulance service that has served the community since 1974, will cease to exist.

In its place will be the county-owned Putnam County Emergency Medical Services, which is taking on the assets and employees of OL.

While the change in name may seem minimal, the big difference is in the scope of coverage provided by the newly-formed entity.

“The main goal behind this was three ambulances, 24-7, stationed throughout the county,” Commissioner Rick Woodall said, “one in Bainbridge, one in Cloverdale, one in Greencastle.”

In recent years, ever-decreasing funds for EMS have forced OL to only have two ambulances running all the time, both stationed in Greencastle.

Woodall is hopeful to expand that coverage in future years.

“I would like to, as time passes, put a second one in Greencastle, but that’s down the road,” Woodall said. “Sixty one percent of runs are in Greencastle. It’s currently an eight-minute response time in Greencastle, but 22 minutes outside of the city. I hope that we can cut that in half.”

Of course, the additional coverage wasn’t a simple as just saying the county would staff an additional ambulance. The most important piece of the puzzle came with Operation Life hiring new employees back in November.

Not only did the non-profit hire the soon-to-be county employees, but also paid for their training.

“They’re all certified and ready to roll Jan. 1,” Woodall said.

And it’s not just the new crews that will come aboard. With four shifts of six employees each, plus a director and assistant director, Putnam County is adding 26 full-time employees and a few part-timers in the new year.

One piece of good news is being a government-owned service in a rural area seems to have made Putnam County EMS an attractive place to work.

“We are going to have even more quality employees because now they can do PERF (Public Employee Retirement Fund) since we’re a government entity,” Woodall said. “We have a lot of people coming from Indy wanting to work. We had four paramedic and four EMT spots available, and we had 42 applications overall.”

The lower volume of calls than in an urban or suburban area is also attractive to applicants.

“It’s a lot slower pace than Indy so a lot of people want to work here,” Woodall said. “We get more applicants and better candidates, which means that we get better care, more knowledge.”

The goal is lower response times and better coverage, which remains a challenge.

“Even though it’s only six or seven runs a day, we’re covering 482 square miles,” Woodall said.

Besides new employees, though, the county is also acquiring buildings and four ambulances.

While the buildings are aging, Woodall said there appear to be no major problems.

“We will be doing some remodeling this year in 2020. One of the things with OL is it ran bare-bones so there was hardly any money for maintenance,” Woodall said. “Stuff isn’t bad, but it’s getting old and it needs some upkeep. There will be some cosmetic work done to the stations.”

The three main ambulances are also in good shape, though they are all likely to age out at the same time. In 2017, the county bought three ambulances for OL, as two had too many miles and another was crashed in late 2016.

“What we have to do as a county is we have to put some type of capital plan together,” Woodall said. “We’re going to have to buy some type of ambulance in the next year or two because all three of those are going to wear out at the same time.”

Woodall added that the back-up ambulance is also not a good replacement for a very long time.

“It can run for a day or two, but if one of the others was out of commission for a couple of weeks, we’d probably have to rent one,” Woodall said.

The final piece, but a big one, is financial. For the last two years, the county has contributed $400,000 annually to the OL budget, up from $80,000 in previous years.

The difference now is, if there’s a budget shortfall, the county has to account for it.

During a lengthy discussion in September, Putnam County Council members questioned how the county would make up for such an issue.

Woodall and his fellow commissioners volunteered that they could make up for it from the Economic Development Income Tax (EDIT) Warchest.

One piece of good news is that as a government entity, the county can recoup a higher percentage of its expenses from Medicare and Medicaid runs than OL could as a non-profit.

However, it remains unclear what that figure is.

The county also has greater ability to collect unpaid funds through a program the Association of Indiana Counties initiated in which back payments to a government entity can be collected from an individual’s state tax return.

“We’re not going to get all of that back because there’s people out there that can’t pay,” Woodall said. “But there’s some who can but don’t, and it will take money from their state tax return.”

One thing that won’t be changing, Woodall said, is the status of PMH ambulance, which has run since 1976 without county assistance.

The county will continue to partner with the Roachdale-based service.

Even with Operation Life technically no longer existing, the OL board will remain in place through 2020 to attend to any loose ends or ongoing business.

In the end, though, Putnam County EMS is the primary emergency medical provider for Putnam County moving forward.

“My goal in this whole project was to provide the county with three ambulances, 24-7, without costing the county any more than the current $400,000,” Woodall said. “That’s a very tough goal to meet. We’re going to find out.”