Billing services for Meade County EMS highlighted a special called meeting of Meade County Fiscal Court Tuesday (12/1) night.
The court met to further discuss it’s options of how the county will handle new medical billing codes which impacts how the county receives payment for the use of the ambulance service. Members of the court along with some EMS personnel attended a work session a couple weeks ago, where a presentation from Ambulance Medical Billing was held.
Magistrates took the information from that meeting and other service providers along with revenue reports provided from the County’s EMS billing department for comparison. During the meeting Tuesday night, the court asked any additional questions of Randy Overstreet, Regional sales Manager of AMB along with EMS personnel who was in attendance.
During the discussion, the conversation became focused on opinions of revenue and personnel as Billing Manger Pam Weber voiced her opposition toward outsourcing the billing to vendor. She stated to the court that she felt revenues would be lower and the county should not spend money for a vendor since there have not been any issue with insurance payments under the current system. Currently, the EMS Billing Department is Weber and one part time secretary. Weber asked what would happen to their job roles. Judge Executive Gerry Lynn said that if the court moved forward on outsourcing, that Weber would be taken care of as her duties would adjust and she would have a job until her retirement but the part time job would be eliminated as Weber would be able to handle the workload.
Judge Executive Lynn said outsourcing the billing with a company that has constant training in medical billing and coding which keeps up with the changing landscape of insurance billing and will potentially increase revenue for the county and will reduce employee overtime.
EMS Director Mike Wise told magistrates currently EMS workers spend up to two to three hours of manually charting their runs after they come back from runs which leads to overtime for crews. He said that was a result of computer updates which are not fixing issues but delaying fixes and are behind due to meeting the new state mandates on medical providers. Judge Executive Lynn said the county IT department has been spending about 15 hours of overtime due to the technical issues at EMS.
After the discussion, Fiscal Court voted to approve entering into a three year contract with AMB.
In other business on the agenda, the court tabled a presentation related to a request of funds for a grant to upright the Alice Dean until their next regular meeting scheduled next Tuesday, December 8 at 7 pm.
You must be logged in to post a comment.