Stanislaus County is getting its own EMS agency. Here’s who will pay the higher costs
Hospitals are facing higher fees for their trauma and stroke centers as a new emergency medical services agency is established in Stanislaus County.
The county Board of Supervisors gave approval Tuesday evening for the newly created Local Emergency Medical Services Agency to assess the annual monitoring fees, but $174,500 will be used to subsidize the costs and soften the blow for hospital budgets next fiscal year.
“When we embarked on this path, we didn’t expect it to go smoothly,” Supervisor Vito Chiesa said. “We’ve had hiccups on the way, but we are going in the right direction.”
Stanislaus County served notice in March 2021 it was breaking away from the Mountain-Valley EMS joint powers authority, a multi-county partnership for regulating ambulance service and the emergency medical services system.
Stanislaus will operate its own EMS agency, called LEMSA, as a division of the Sheriff’s Department. It recently developed the new fees to cover the agency’s annual costs, but county officials said hospital administrators and representatives of the Hospital Council of Northern & Central California told them the sharp increases over Mountain-Valley’s charges would impact hospital budgets.
The subsidy for hospitals was proposed in the staff report for Tuesday’s board item. No one spoke at the public hearing.
Stanislaus was by far the largest county in the Mountain-Valley EMS Agency, which also included Calaveras, Mariposa, Amador and Alpine counties. The smaller counties will continue as partners in a four-county EMS agency and hope to have the required staffing in June, according to board minutes in April.
Stanislaus is adopting almost 100 fees that were assessed by Mountain-Valley. The JPA agency had not adjusted the hospital specialty center fees for years.
The fees approved Tuesday represent a total increase of $348,944 for hospitals that have trauma, heart attack and stroke centers. The county held onto money in an EMS enhancement fund to pay for $390,650 in startup costs for LEMSA, and will shift $174,472 from that fund to subsidize half the fee increase for hospitals for one year.
The fund, used for enhancing the EMS system, is fed by monetary penalties when ambulance companies don’t meet standards for response. The fund balance was $1.92 million in April.
Level I trauma center is planned
The annual fees for the two Level II trauma centers in Stanislaus County will jump from $100,000 to $178,490.
Doctors Medical Center is applying for Level I trauma status, which will require more agency staff time for monitoring, a county staff report said. The Level I trauma center fee will be just over $200,000.
The fees for hospital stroke centers will rise to about $65,000, a $40,000 increase, and centers for emergency treatment of patients suffering from myocardial infarction will be assessed $48,500, a $16,500 increase. Other fees for ambulance providers are going up 12%.
This story was originally published May 18, 2022 at 8:47 AM.
