City Hires Tele-Nurses to Assist 911

The Houston (Tex.) city council has approved a $6.8 million, 5-year contract with Healthcare Alliance to provide registered nurses 24-hours-a-day to provide first-aid advice to 911 callers, medical referrals and patient evaluations. The contract includes $3 million of liability insurance per incident. Right now, a city study found it spends $50 million a year on fire and EMS responses to non-emergency medical incidents. A 2006 study concluded that one-half of the daily 750 medical incidents could be eliminated with proper screening. Comm center officials say a 911 dispatcher will make the first evaluation, and if a medical-incident caller clearly has a non-emergency, the call would be transferred to the nurse, who will be located at the contractor’s call center. Richmond (Virg.) and Philadelphia (Penn.) reportedly have similar existing programs. Richmond officials said their one year-old program has never experienced a transferred call that turned out to be an actual emergency. Check the Web site of the provider of the tele-nurses, CareNet of San Antonio.