Rural Metro's ambulance contract with Santa Clara County

[DPM]

MDT's are great, but their system status management is still worse than when AMR was in the county. The things you've listed are good for the providers, but they were also very expensive (include the brand new fleet, new monitors etc) and SCC has become a very expensive contract for them.

I'm not saying everything is R/M's fault, but they agreed to this contact. If they're having trouble staying profitable they have no one else to blame.

 

[Akulahawk]

SCC's Policy 613 got started when I was last working there. It's undergone some revisions since I left. One of which was the county purchasing/designating the standards for PPE. The original PPE requirement didn't get as specific. IIRC, they were also getting ready to start those HazMat, and the other courses as requirements for working there.

If I were R/M, implementing an SSM plan, I'd probably wildly overstaff and closely watch usage patterns from there, slowly backing down on the staffing until maintaining somewhere near 92% all the time, to allow for a very few incidents where a greatly unusual surge in calls occurs.

 

[DPM]

SCC's Policy 613 got started when I was last working there. It's undergone some revisions since I left. One of which was the county purchasing/designating the standards for PPE. The original PPE requirement didn't get as specific. IIRC, they were also getting ready to start those HazMat, and the other courses as requirements for working there.

If I were R/M, implementing an SSM plan, I'd probably wildly overstaff and closely watch usage patterns from there, slowly backing down on the staffing until maintaining somewhere near 92% all the time, to allow for a very few incidents where a greatly unusual surge in calls occurs.

The problem is, they agreed to charge X amount of money for their services (X being an amount less than AMR did.) So while AMR managed to run a busy system with a less than ideal reimbursement rate R/M is having trouble staffing the necessary number of units to stay compliant and also remain profitable. Raising the cost to the consumer would put R/M in breach of their contract so they're stuck trying to do the same as AMR with less $$.

 

[Akulahawk]

The problem is, they agreed to charge X amount of money for their services (X being an amount less than AMR did.) So while AMR managed to run a busy system with a less than ideal reimbursement rate R/M is having trouble staffing the necessary number of units to stay compliant and also remain profitable. Raising the cost to the consumer would put R/M in breach of their contract so they're stuck trying to do the same as AMR with less $$.

Unfortunately, I'm not at all surprised that R/M is doing this... AMR was having trouble as well... but at least they were able to somehow make do. It just isn't easy to make money or even break even on 911 calls because of the number of people that don't have insurance or can't pay, even in that county.