Bargersville fire officials are looking at a program would allow them to better serve local residents to help prevent medical emergencies.
The Bargersville Fire Department is considering a paramedicine program, which would allow fire departments to take a greater role in primary care and preventative services. Paramedics would check in on people with chronic conditions, as well as those who had recently left the hospital to help ensure they don’t have a health setback, said Betsy Swearingen, director of the Johnson County Health Department.
“(People) go home with a laundry list of medications, 25 pages of discharge papers about what they need to do to stay healthy,” she said. “We plan to visit people, go through a list of medications, check the safety of the home, understand what happened to them in the hospital and help them understand how to stay healthy in the future.”
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If successfully implemented, the program would be the first in Johnson County, Swearingen said.
The fire department only started considering the idea earlier this year, and officials are not yet sure how a paramedicine program would be funded, who would staff it and other details, said Bargersville Fire Department Deputy Chief Mike Herron.
Finding the answers to those questions are the next steps in the process for the department, which is looking to partner with local organizations to bolster its chances at a successful rollout in the future, Herron said. The department has already had conversations with entities such as Johnson Memorial Health and the county health department about the idea.
“We’d like to be a partner with other county agencies to provide a service to the community and assist with getting it implement in Johnson County,” Herron said. “It’s really just trying to get information and talk to other agencies that might be interested in putting it forth.”
The Bargersville Fire Department and Johnson County Health Department are unsure of where funding will come from, but under Indiana law, if funding comes from any county, town or city agency, that allocated money will have to be approved by those agencies’ boards.
As they investigate the potential for a paramedicine program, Bargersville has also reached out to the Crawfordsville Fire Department for input about its own program. Crawfordsville has used paramedicine since 2017.
The process of implementing such a program can often be quite extensive, as it took Crawfordsville four years of planning before it was ready, Crawfordsville Deputy Fire Chief Paul Miller said. One of the lengthiest parts of that process was training the paramedics, who were required to have a minimum of five years of experience and complete 100 hours of classroom training and 200 hours of clinical training. Currently, the department has four full-time community paramedics and one full-time social worker, Miller said.
Those paramedics focus on a variety of diseases, including heart disease, maternal and child health, substance abuse, behavioral health and disorders and fall prevention, he said.
Paramedics call patients and also visit them in their homes at least once a month to make sure they understand and are following hospital instructions, Miller said. They can also connect patients struggling with food insecurity to programs like Meals on Wheels and people without cars to transportation alternatives.
Assisting people before they get to the point of being readmitted to the hospital not only helps people be healthier, but saves costs, he said.
“Treating the patient where they’re at will reduce the overall cost of care,” Miller said. “Commercial insurers are getting behind this.”
Currently, there is no way for the Crawfordsville Fire Department to collect money for medical services, so funding for the paramedicine program comes from Franciscan Health, as well as from grant funding for substance abuse work and a local public safety tax for behavioral health monitoring, Miller said.
Even though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced in Feburary it would reimburse fire departments through Medicare, people who have Medicare or Medicaid will likely not have to pay any out-of-pocket costs for paramedicine, Miller said.
Crawfordsville is also currently looking at the option of transporting patients to medical clinics in SUVs for non-emergencies, which would save the patient and their insurer the cost of both the ambulance ride and the emergency room visit.
So far in Crawfordsville, the program is seeing results. After the program started, there was a significant decrease in people using emergency services after they were discharged from the hospital, Miller said.
While Crawfordsville is willing to offer support and advice for Bargersville as the department tries to get a paramedicine program off the ground, local partnerships like the one between Bargersville and the Johnson County Health Department are going to be essential for a successful program, Miller said.
The Johnson County Health Department is backing Bargersville’s vision because it can prevent people from being readmitted to the hospital and also can benefit the entire county, Swearingen said.
“It seems like this is a unique program that would benefit Johnson County in helping to alleviate the returns to the hospital from recently discharged patients,” Swearingen said. “This is a way to educate and protect citizens at a reasonable costs. I believe we will search and apply for as many grants as we can to fund the program.”
