MedStar Mobile Healthcare Partners With Home Health Provider
Ed's Note: Klarus Administrator Dan Bruce is a featured speaker at the Mobile Healthcare Summit: Policy and Payer Update on March 25 in Washington, D.C. This 5-hour program will review the financial determinants driving the need for mobile integrated healthcare; provide insight into the perspective of healthcare payers and policy leaders; and explore strategies to engage and collaborate with healthcare payers. Register today at MIHSummit.com.
Fort Worth, TX – January 30, 2014 – Klarus Home Care and MedStar Mobile Healthcare have entered into a partnership for services to help Klarus meet patient needs for immediate medical care and help ensure the patient’s medical needs are met in the home environment, circumventing unnecessary trips to the emergency room. The cost of services provided by MedStar is absorbed by Klarus Home Care.
Under this unique program, a Klarus clinician can utilize MedStar’s Mobile Healthcare Paramedics (MHPs) to assess a patient's needs in the home as a routine service 24 hours a day. Additionally, the addresses of Klarus Home Care patients who reside in the MedStar service area are registered in the MedStar 9-1-1 Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system so that if the Klarus patient calls 9-1-1, a MedStar MHP can respond along with emergency medical service personnel. While on-scene, MedStar will provide feedback to the Klarus team to mutually determine the most appropriate resource for the patient’s immediate medical needs.
“We are very excited about partnering with MedStar on this program and believe that the high level emergency resources offered by MedStar will strengthen our ability to more effectively and efficiently respond to patient needs by providing diagnostics and treatment in the home while preventing defaults to care in an emergency room setting which is significantly more costly and taxing for our patients," explains Klarus Administrator Dan Bruce. "The Community Needs Assessment in the Regional Health Care Partnership Plan led by JPS reports that every CHF hospitalization avoided saves the health care system some $9,203.00. Patients with congestive heart failure frequently visit the emergency room when they become symptomatic and feel short of breath. These are patients who we can easily be evaluated and treated in the home at a fraction of the cost of care delivered in an emergency room setting. It is often as simple as calming a patient’s anxieties and providing some needed reassurance."
MedStar Clinical Manager Sean Burton explains the role the MHPs will have with the patients: “Our role will be to provide an in-home patient assessment when contacted by a Klarus clinician or when a Klarus patient calls 9-1-1 for an immediate medical concern. Our team members will be able to perform a full assessment, provide feedback to the Klarus team from the scene and, if requested by Klarus, facilitate treatments such as medication adjustments or in-home diuresis for heart failure, wound vac troubleshooting, and maintenance or replacement of indwelling urinary catheters.”
The MHPs have been provided training and access to Klarus’ electronic health record system so they can review the patient’s medical history, medications, allergies and other pertinent medical information to help them understand the potential medical needs of the patients they will be working with while on scene with the patient.
This program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, is another step in the evolution of emergency medical service providers becoming more integrated into the healthcare system using mobile healthcare resources to meet the needs of patients in the local community and was officially launched on February 1.
About Klarus Home Care
Klarus Home Care is owned and operated by Karen Howell and Kayla Slater. Klarus is a Joint Commission accredited, comprehensive skilled home health provider with locations in Texas and New Mexico. A more robust description of the clinical offerings, specialty programs, and geographical coverage areas of Klarus is available at www.klarushomecare.com.
About MedStar
Responding to over 117,000 calls each year, MedStar Mobile Healthcare is the exclusive emergency and non-emergency ambulance service provider to over 880,000 residents throughout Fort Worth and 14 other Tarrant County cities. Established in 1986, MedStar is governed by the Area Metropolitan Ambulance Authority board of directors, is one of only 33 ambulance services in the country to receive national accreditation by both the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services and the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. MedStar is also the only agency to be recognized as an EMS 10 Innovator by JEMS Magazine. MedStar was also recognized as the Paid EMS Provider of the Year by EMS World Magazine and the National Association of EMTs in 2013.
