Video: Part II of the Medical Helicopter Series: The Growth of Medical Choppers in Mississippi

LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – There are nine medical helicopter companies in Mississippi and over a dozen aircraft.

The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s AirCare program has four medical helicopters flying over Mississippi.

They try to put aircraft in locations where there’s the most need or where there’s a request.

“The flight requests are way more than we can handle for most of the time, even with a lot of helicopters in the area. Whether we have to turn it down because we are busy on other flights, or the weather is just not favorable enough for us to feel like we can safely make the flight, so it generally, it’s really a hard question to answer,” says AirCare Columbus and Meridian Base Operations Manager, Sam Marshall.

Supporting the state’s medical needs is one reason behind AirCare’s growth and the number of medical choppers in Mississippi.

“From the competitive side, we have great partners in the industry and they do great jobs. We have a little different model, but every model has its place,” says University of Mississippi Medical Center AirCare Director, Dr. Damon Darsey.

Each medical air group operates under a certain business model.

“A private model, which is owned and operated by an area mileage company, much like a lot of the ground ambulances are, and then there’s a hybrid model, which is a little bit of the traditional with the hospital base and a little bit of private together, and so we have all three models in Mississippi, and they all three have their merits and they all three have their challenges,” says Darsey.

AirCare been operating under a traditional model for the last two decades.

“The medical center owns the people, the billing process, the medical control, everything but the pilots and mechanics and we contract that out to the largest helicopter company in the world.”

Getting patients from point A to point B as fast as they can is not their goal.

Instead, it’s providing as much care in the air as possible.

“There’s $160,000 dollars worth of medicines on board that aircraft. A comparable aircraft across the state, state minimum would be about $4,000 dollars and so the vast difference is there. We’re afforded that because we have a mechanism to bring those drugs to the patient,” says Darsey.

AirCare and North Mississippi Medical Center are the two main helicopter companies operating in the Golden Triangle and Tupelo.

However, other programs fly in the area, including some Alabama companies.