OCH Board Discusses Response Times, Pafford

OKTIBBEHA COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – The conversation continues about who will care for, and transport you during an emergency.

In a meeting on Tuesday, the OCH Regional Medical Center Board said many patients still have questions and concerns.

It was the first board of trustees meeting since Starkville decided to use Pafford, a private EMS provider, instead of OCH.

In the meeting, OCH CEO Richard Hilton called on an OCH physician and his EMS Director, Michael Hunt.
Hunt offered another rebuttal, of sorts, to the city’s concerns about response times.

“Out of the city calls the average response time was 6 minutes and forty seconds,” Hunt said.

Hunt said many of the long response times were for non-emergency calls and that records didn’t reflect that.

“There’s a lot of calls where we don’t see what’s going on in the background…such as ones from Starkville Manor they would call and say we got a tube that needs to be replaced”

Hunt went on to say Pafford, the company Starkville selected is telling state employees they’re out of network, which means patients could face a bigger bill.

Last week OCH CEO Richard Hilton said they wouldn’t have to make cuts to the service, because much of their money comes from patient transfers. Today he said the future will be challenging.

“Anytime you have two entities in a community providing the same service, its going to have an impact on both of them financially,” Hilton said.

He said they might have to subsidize the service to keep it going.

“Any time you got 42 percent of your revenue stream that’s cut out you might have to take a look at that,” Hilton said.

Hilton and Hunt both said they’d be willing to address the city’s concerns if the city changed it’s mind and gave OCH another chance, but at this point it could be too late, as the city is moving forward with Pafford.

We reached out to Pafford to ask if state employees are in network, and we haven’t heard back.

Hunt said OCH is meeting with representatives from the county, university, and fire departments to see about placing ambulances in different places in the county for faster response times.