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STAR EMS
Pontiac, Michigan
Quality healthcare is important, regardless of whom you are or where
you live.
 It is one of the areas in life that is taken so seriously
that people will go to great effort to attain the best healthcare
possible. As such, the professionals and organizations working in
the healthcare field that have proven their invaluable worth can
become quickly inundated with “business.”
Case example: Star EMS.
Star EMS, a private-for-profit
Emergency Medical Service (EMS) purchased in June of 2003, by Floyd
Miles Jr and Bill Grubb, serves a large portion of Oakland County,
Michigan an area of 1.3 million people north of Detroit. The mission
statement of Star EMS – “We take care of people, that’s what we do.”
– is not just a plaque that hangs on the office wall, but a pulse
that resonates throughout the entire company. Bill Grubb, partner
and CEO of Star EMS, says that their mission statement integrates
with their motto, which is a quote from Richard K. Schachern: “There
is no higher honor than to be given the responsibility to care for
another human being.” Obviously, Bill has led his organization to
operate according to this philosophy, and word has spread as
exemplified by their rate of growth: from an average of 65 to over
700 service calls per week in under four years. “People have asked
me how we have grown so quickly,” says Bill. Certainly, Bill’s
involvement at nearly every level of the organization, including
spending days working the ambulance runs, has a great deal to do
with the organization’s excellence in fluency, efficiency,
professionalism, level of quality and employee morale. Ortivus is
proud that Star EMS has partnered with them, using the Sweet
software applications as part of the operational component of the
business.
Star EMS began using Sweet-Billing
(then called Amazon Billing) on June 15 of 2003, when they began
operations. The Sweet-CAD and Sweet-Field Data applications are also
part of the Star EMS operational system, with the field data
application just being installed in 2007. Bill states that the
integration of the information between the three Sweet applications
is crucial, as it eliminates key strokes and data entry time
significantly. He also appreciates the customer service he has
received from Ortivus and says that, “If a problem occurs, we don’t
want to have more than one company to work with.” With such an
extensive knowledge of the Sweet (billing, field data collection and
computer-aided dispatch) programs, Ortivus is able to identify
issues more quickly and seamlessly than an EMS service working with
multiple disjointed vendors. Time is important, especially in the
business of healthcare.
The drive for achieving excellence is
found throughout Star EMS, as demonstrated in June of 2006 when Star
EMS hosted an Ortivus Hands-On Group training. Although Ortivus has
conducted group trainings at customer sites in the past, this was
the first “hands-on” group training coordinated with a customer,
which involved set-up and preparation for hosting other EMS services
on-site with functional computer systems working from a common
database (Ortivus’ Protective Healthcare Information (PHI)-protected
test database) for each person. Kim Boyd, the Billing Manager for
Star EMS, who coordinated the event, said, “I considered it a great
success! We would love to host another at some point and other
services should definitely consider this. We had several relatively
new employees and the cost of bringing the User group to our
location versus sending multiple employees out of state for training
was considerably less. It is a great benefit to have your [Star EMS]
entire staff receive hands-on training at the same time. As a group,
we were able to think of questions or problems that were specific to
our company and resolve them together. We also invited people in
from other services. This helped to share the cost of the group
training and better yet, build friendships with other services. We
remain in contact with one another and often share helpful
information. All participants in the group training share the same
state-specific requirements. Collectively, we were able to answer
one another’s questions along with our awesome trainer. It never
ceases to amaze me that each and every time I attend an Ortivus User
Group or Group Training, I learn something new that the program can
do for our service.”
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