If you live in a large metropolis like Columbus, getting seriously injured might mean being transported to one of the Level-1 trauma centers in the area. In Athens, there are no trauma centers, so the method of transport could be the difference between life and death.
It’s an issue health experts say often plague rural areas like Athens County, where the nearest large-scale medical center is O’Bleness Memorial Hospital, a facility that isn’t designated by the state to handle any level of trauma for adults or children.
“But it’s one of the best facilities in Southeast Ohio,” said Todd Bailey, Vice President of Development for MedFlight, the company that transfers critical patients in Athens to hospitals in Columbus or elsewhere.
And it’s not O’Bleness’ fault it doesn’t hold that designation from the state, health care officials and Ohio University experts said.
Tania Basta, associate professor of social and public health at OU and the associate director of the Appalachian Rural Health Institute, said she believes the idea of O’Bleness being a “bad” hospital is outdated.
“That’s a misconception that we really need to change,” Basta said.
When a patient needs care beyond what O’Bleness can offer, the medical staff can call on MedFlight to send a helicopter and crew.
“They know their limitations,” Basta said of the staff at O’Bleness. “…They can recognize when they can move someone to a trauma center.”
Ronald Vance, a Southeast Ohio native and associate professor of nursing at OU’s Chillicothe branch, said centers like O’Bleness are an important part of the puzzle for rural health care: they provide the chance for a patient to be stabilized before flight.
“That’s the benefit of having a small hospital close to home,” Vance, of Meigs County, said.
But why not just have a designated trauma center in Athens?
Colin Yoder, spokesman for OhioHealth, the health system that includes Grant Medical Center in Columbus where O’Bleness’ most critical patients are sometimes flown, said there’s a lot more to being a trauma center than people think.
“We must be ready at all times to care for the most critically injured patients,” Yoder said.
So, 24/7, they have to keep a highly specialized medical staff on call at the facility, he said.
That includes a trauma surgeon, neurosurgeon, plastic surgeon, radiologists, orthopedic trauma surgeons and surgical nurses, to name a few. In addition, there’s a staff there to maintain the blood bank and a lab.
“As you can imagine, that’s a pretty high-cost operation,” Yoder said. “If you try to apply that model to a smaller community like Athens, it may not work because the volume of patients aren’t there.”
He said Grant gets 12 traumas a day on average, or about 4,300 a year.
OhioHealth is in the process of making O’Bleness a full member of the OhioHealth system. That would give it access to the “full complement of clinical expertise, financial resources and logistical support that a large health care system can provide,” according to a press release.
Spokespeople for O’Bleness did not respond to requests for comment by press time; therefore, it wasn’t immediately clear how many traumas the hospital sees.
Yoder said getting to a trauma center within an hour of being seriously injured — whether it’s being crushed in a car crash or taking a serious blow to the head — helps your chances of survival. After that hour, survival rates diminish.
Being that Columbus is about an hour and a half away from Athens, without the Nelsonville Bypass, the life-saving measure of being flown from Athens to Columbus is often necessary, though it’s expensive.
Basta said it could cost around $20,000.
Some insurance policies pay for the transport if it can be proven that the drastic move was necessary. Sometimes uninsured people get transported, and often, people can’t pay.
It’s something Bailey said MedFlight feels when it bills for services.
“Is it a struggle? Yeah, but that doesn’t change our mission,” he said, noting that MedFlight, a nonprofit, doesn’t see being able to pay for the service as prerequisite for getting a helicopter off the ground and on the way to help.
As Outreach Coordinator Amanda Ball put it, “if we’re needed, we go.”
Still, that mission leads MedFlight to some fiscal challenges.
“Of all the people we transport, we get less than 50 cents out of the dollar,” Bailey said.
But all that might change with the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare,” though it’s probably too soon to tell. Bailey said not enough provisions of the act have actually been implemented to tell just how much it’ll affect the business.
“Truly, it’s a mystery,” he said.
A Sept. 25 New York Times/CBS News poll showed 51 percent of Americans are confused about health care reform, and MedFlight officials are no different.
Bailey said the company will be taking a “wait and see” approach to figure out how the law will affect its bottom line.
But one theory suggests that as more people get health insurance — Obama’s law requires individuals have a policy or possibly face a fine, though there are some exceptions to the rule — MedFlight will get more money flowing from those it transports.
Though it is using public confusion about the law to its advantage.
Just two weeks ago, the company started offering a program called MedFlight Advantage, which is aimed to give people the peace of mind that they won’t end up footing the bill for emergency helicopter transport.
For $69.99 a year, expenses for “full service ground and helicopter transport for an entire family if the unthinkable happens” would be covered, according to a press release.
“The fact that there’s uncertainty presents an opportunity for this product that we’re offering,” which Bailey said is essentially “eliminating the burden of a very costly transport.”
jj360410@ohiou.edu
@JoshJame
