The Washington County Board of Supervisors were given a few proposals of how to increase revenue and maintain and attract new staff for the county ambulance service.

Ambulance Director Jeremy Peck presented a contract for the Public Consulting Group, who works with ground ambulance services through Medicaid cost recovery programs. Peck says currently with Medicaid service calls there are about eight different insurance companies that give ambulance services a small amount of the total costs for transport with the ambulance service having to write the rest off. Peck says this agreement would give a nine percent contingency fee to PCG, “We have to put some money in but we get all of our money back and we get the 70% short of their fees for that back. So we’re talking to the tune of I think we had $120-some thousand that we did not get recovered last year because Medicaid wrote it off and this is money that we’re now going to be getting back. So we’re basically going to spend less than $12,000 to get over $100,000 back through this company.”

Action on the contract was tabled pending approval from County Attorney John Gish. Peck also proposed that the county increase the pay for ambulance employees, since when the service began operations under the county in July of 2020 they decided to start all employees regardless of experience at the starting wage. Peck proposed to pay new hires based on their years of experience equal to what they would pay current employees that had been with the service that long. He would also slightly increase the current staff’s pay. Peck says with staff recently taking time off it has been difficult to fill paramedic shifts, an issue he says is nationwide. If they have to start mandating employees to work, Peck says they will do so, though he would prefer not to as that would lower morale. No action was taken on that item.