House Introduces PSOB Bill (H.R. 2887)

Posted on May 23, 2019 by AAA Staff

The American Ambulance Association (AAA) is pleased to announce that Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY-01) and Congressman Thomas Suozzi (D-NY-03) have introduced H.R. 2887, the “Emergency Medical Services Providers Protection Act.” This piece of legislation would extend the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit (PSOB) to cover first responders who work for private providers. The PSOB Program provides death and education benefits to survivors of fallen law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other first responders, and disability benefits to officers catastrophically injured in the line of duty. The AAA has advocated tirelessly for years that all first responders killed in the line of duty, should be eligible for this benefit regardless of who their employer is. Many of the nation’s first responders work for more than one EMS Agency. Local communities throughout the country decide which organization is best fit to provide high quality mobile healthcare to their community. For large parts of the country, privately run ambulance services have been providing high quality health care, and responding to the same natural disasters, incidents, etc. as their peers for decades. It is common for Paramedics and EMTs to also work/volunteer as firefighters and vice versa. Currently, if a line of duty death occurs, whether (more…)

CMS Releases ET3 Request for Applications (RFA)

Posted on May 22, 2019 by AAA Staff

Just minutes ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the release of the Request for Applications (RFA) for the Emergency Triage, Treat, and Transport (ET3) Model. The RFA can be found here. CMS is not accepting applications at this time but has released the RFA so that those ambulance services thinking about submitting an application can review it. In the notice, CMS also shared some FAQs on ET3. The AAA team is currently reviewing the RFA and will be sending out a notice with additional details shortly.

Member Update on Balance Billing

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Aidan Camas

This morning Ruth Hazdovac and Aidan Camas of AAA staff and Kathy Lester, Esq, Healthcare Consultant to the AAA attended a briefing held by the House Energy & Commerce Committee on the issue of surprise/balance billing. At the briefing, staff for Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) announced that they would be releasing a bipartisan discussion draft, the No Surprises Act, which would “protect consumers from surprise medical bills and increase transparency in our health care system.” As of now, ground and air ambulances are NOT included in the discussion draft. However, the committee is asking for comments on ground and air ambulance and recommendations on how to provide relief to the consumer in this area. The AAA has a Balance Billing Work Group that is hard at work developing a policy recommendation that will work for our members. The House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Lloyd Doggett also announced today that the Health Subcommittee will hold a hearing next week entitled “Hearing on Protecting Patients from Surprise Medical Bills.” AAA Staff will be at the briefing and provide a timely update to membership on any developments. The AAA team will be submitting comments and (more…)

EMS Week Activity Survey

Posted on May 9, 2019 by AAA Staff

EMS Week is May 19-25, 2019. The AAA wants to know how your organization is celebrating this year! Please let us know what your organization has planned. Also, please be sure to tag the AAA is your EMS Week social media posts so we can “like” and “share” what your organization is doing! The best submissions will also be posted in the AAA weekly digest. Please email info@ambulance.org if you have any questions.

Empress Ambulance Service, PatientCare Logistics Solutions Team to Deliver Critical Ambulance and Healthcare Logistics Services in Greater New York

Posted on April 24, 2019 by AAA Staff

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media contact: Stephen Brown, Cookerly PR 404-419-9224 stephen@cookerly.com Empress Ambulance Service, PatientCare Logistics Solutions Team to Deliver Critical Ambulance and Healthcare Logistics Services in Greater New York Leading EMS provider in the Tri-State Region to leverage PatientCare’s nationwide scale and resources to extend customer service tradition more than three decades strong Tyler, Texas and Yonkers, New York (April 18, 2019) – PatientCare Logistics Solutions (PatientCare), a leading provider of ground-based 911 emergency ambulance and other critical healthcare logistics services, has teamed with Empress Ambulance Service (Empress) in Yonkers, NY, to further support the growing needs of the Tri-State Region. Empress provides emergency and non-emergency ambulance services with advanced life support (ALS) and basic life support (BLS) services to municipalities and hospital systems across New York’s Westchester County. Additionally, Empress operates significant ambulance services in the Bronx and Manhattan boroughs, giving the organization a strong overall footprint in Greater New York. Empress, owned and operated for more than 30 years by the Minerva family, is managed today by brothers Mike, Dan and Matt Minerva, as well as long-time colleague Jim O’Connor. These experienced ambulance industry operators will continue to serve their established communities on a full-time (more…)

Summary of March 28, 2019 Ambulance ODF

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Brian Werfel

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) held its latest Open Door Forum on Wednesday, March 28, 2019. As with past Open Door Forums, CMS started the call with the following announcements: Ambulance Cost Data Collection – CMS reminded the industry that the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, enacted on February 9, 2018, requires CMS to create a new cost data collection system by December 31, 2019. Emergency Triage, Treat, and Transport Model – A representative from the Innovation Center within CMS provided an overview of the “Emergency Triage, Treat, and Transport Model” or “ET3.” This is a 5-year pilot program intended to provide ambulance providers with greater flexibility to handle low-acuity 911 calls, by providing Medicare payment for: (a) ambulance transportation to alternative treatment destinations and (b) treatment at the scene. The CMS representative indicated that CMS is in possession of data that suggests that 16% of emergency ambulance transports to a hospital emergency department could have been resolved by transporting the patient to an alternative treatment site, e.g., an urgent care center. CMS estimates that had all of these patients elected to receive care in the lower-acuity setting, it would have saved the Medicare Program approximately $560 (more…)

HHS OIG Issues Advisory Opinion on Community Paramedicine

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Brian Werfel

HHS OIG Issues Advisory Opinion Permitting Community Paramedicine Program Designed to Limit Hospital Readmissions On March 6, 2019, the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) posted OIG Advisory Opinion 19-03. The opinion related to free, in-home follow-up care offered by a hospital to eligible patients for the purpose of reducing hospital admissions or readmissions. The Requestor was a nonprofit medical center that provides a range of inpatient and outpatient hospital services. The Requestor and an affiliated health care clinic are both part of an integrated health system that operates in three states. The Requestor had previously developed a program to provide free, in-home follow-up care to certain patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) that it has certified to be at higher risk of admission or readmission to a hospital. The Requestor was proposing to expand the program to also include certain patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). According to the Requestor, the purpose of both its existing program and its proposed expansion was to increase patient compliance with discharge plans, improve patient health, and reduce hospital inpatient admissions and readmissions. Under the existing program, clinical nurses screen patients to determine if they meet certain eligibility criteria. These include...

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Update on New SNF Edits

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Brian Werfel

CMS Set to Implement New Common Working File Edits to Identify Ambulance Services Provided in Connection with Outpatient Hospital Services that should be bundled to the SNF under Consolidated Billing. In a Member Advisory issued last week, the AAA provided an update on a series of new Common Working File (CWF) edits intended to identify ambulance transports furnished in connection with outpatient hospital services that are properly bundled to the skilled nursing facility under the SNF Consolidated Billing regime. These new edits are set to go into effect on April 1, 2019. In our discussion of the implementation specifics, we attempted to answer the question of what would happen when an ambulance claim is submitted prior to the receipt of the associated hospital outpatient claim, and where the associated hospital claim eventually hit Medicare’s system. Specifically, we indicated as follows: “The Transmittal contains further instructions that the CWF be updated to identify previously rejected ambulance claims upon receipt of an associated hospital claim for the same date of service that contains an Exempted Code. Once identified, the Shared System Maintainer (SSM) is supposed to adjust the previously rejected or denied ambulance claim. At this point, the nature of that “adjustment” is...

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