Changes coming
To Fire Department
By CARL E. HARTDEGEN
Staff Writer
WESTFIELD – July first will be a red-letter day for the city’s fire department, if changes in the works can be completed in time for the beginning of the new fiscal year.
Fire officials have been working on projects to improve operations at the department by outsourcing the ambulance billing, and by changing fees earned from inspections and service to alarm systems.
The department will also benefit from a city-wide initiative to establish a central dispatching agency, which will take over duties currently performed by Fire Department dispatchers.
Since the department started to bill for ambulance services, civilian department employees have handled the billing duties but Fire Chief Mary Regan said that the volume of calls currently handled by the department’s billing clerk “is more than one and a half times the national norm” for department billed ambulance calls. The training required to keep up with additional medical billing codes is outstripping the department’s capacity.
Regan explained that billing is based on services provided and currently not all services which ambulance crews provide are billed for because of the complexities of the medical billing codes required.
With outside billing, she said, the personnel sending out the bills will be fully trained and up-to-date on the necessary codes, so all services will be accounted for in bills. “They’re on top of all that coding which is all supposedly changing in the next year” and said that the employees of an outside billing company will have a much closer relationship with insurance companies and hospitals, allowing for “much more efficient and effective billing.”
“We believe there will be more revenue, even after we pay them” Regan said.
A committee, comprised of firefighters, city accounting and purchasing personnel and Fire Commission Chairman Albert Masciadrelli, was organized and nine billing companies responded to a request for proposals.
Two of those companies – Comstar Ambulance Billing Service and New England Medical Billing –“met all the qualifications” Regan said, and were interviewed.
“The committee felt that Comstar best fit the needs of Westfield”, Regan said and the city’s purchasing director, Tammy Tefft, was asked to write a contract for Comstar, which will be employed assuming contract terms can be agreed to.
Regan said that the switch “doesn’t change things in terms of how we’ve abated bills in the past” for residents who face a hardship paying for ambulance services and use of an outside company will make it more convenient for residents to pay bills by allowing payments with credit cards or a flexible spending account and may also offer a plan to spread payments out over time for citizens who may not be able to pay all the bill all at once.
The current billing clerk, Christy Fillion, will be the liaison with the new company and will also continue to work on previously billed accounts while she takes on additional responsibilities.
Masciadrelli said at the most recent meeting of the Fire Commission “It’s really going to be a migration of our system to their system, which they say is going to be a no-brainer” and Pat Breton, a clerk at the department who has been involved in the changeover planning, agreed saying “They’re going to start brand new.”
Regan said she hopes to have the new billing procedures in place by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year.
Masciadrelli also said that plans to establish a revolving account for funds generated by inspections and services provided by the department are proceeding and said that the chief hopes to start that by the beginning of the new fiscal year too.
The commission had previously approved a proposal by Deputy Chief Patrick Eggloff to change fees charged for inspections, to make them more comparable to those charged by other city department and other communities.
Regan said that those fee changes have been initiated and hopes that a revolving account can be established to allow the funds generated to stay in the department.
Masciadrelli said “That account will be good for the department” as a source of revenue for training and to pay for services the department provides for schools and municipal buildings.
He reported that City Councilor Brent Bean has made a motion to establish the account at a recent City Council meeting and the proposal was referred to the city’s Law Department and the Council’s Legislative and Ordinance Committee.
Bean said that there are such revolving accounts for other departments and said “I figured this was something we could easily fix.”
He said that he expects the L&O committee to bring the proposal out for Council approval in the next few weeks.
A third area of improvement to the Fire Department will be the benefits expected from a city-wide central emergency dispatching agency, which has been proposed to the City Council.
Although that initiative is outside the department’s control, Regan said, it will resolve issues with the department’s aging dispatch system.
And, since the state has mandated that aspects of the plan must be in effect by July 1, that change should also be in place by the start of the new fiscal year.
Carl E. Hartdegen can be reached at [email protected]
