Bowling Green’s Air Evac Lifeteam makes about 40 flights a month from this area to trauma centers in Nashville and Louisville.

The air ambulance service here is housed in the same building as The Medical Center EMS, although they are separate entities.

Ben Cooper, network membership sales manager, spoke Wednesday to the Bowling Green Rotary Club at Bowling Green Country Club about the benefits of membership in the AirMedCare Network. A one-year membership for a household is $65. If anyone in the membership household has to be taken to a hospital via an Air Evac helicopter or an air ambulance from any other service in the AirMedCare Network, the patient will have no out-of-pocket costs.

The average cost of air medical transport from here to Nashville is about $25,000, Cooper said. Even after insurance pays its portion of the bill, if a patient is not a member, he could be responsible for the thousands of dollars that health insurance doesn’t pay. The average insurance payment that Air Evac receives from health insurance is about $8,500 per flight.

“We are within 20 to 30 minutes of some of the best care you can get in this country as far as trauma goes,” Cooper said. “What we will do is take you to the nearest appropriate hospital.” 

Most trauma patients injured in this area are taken to Skyline Medical Center in Nashville, which shaves about 10 minutes off the flight time for patients who can be treated at a Level II trauma center rather than the Level I offered at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. But if a patient has a severe hand injury, that patient would likely go to the University of Louisville Hospital.

Emergency medical service providers, whether they are with a fire department or The Medical Center’s EMS team, make the decision on calling for air transport. That decision depends on a variety of factors from mechanism of injury to type of injury, Cooper said. Many patients with head trauma are often flown to a trauma center.

“Certain types of traumas, they put us on alert,” he said. “EMS will make that call whoever the responder is. … If it’s more than 30 miles out, we will go ahead and start heading that way. That way we’re in the vicinity if they get there and decide they need us, we’re a minute or two out.”

— For information about membership, call 1-800-793-0010.

— Follow news editor Deborah Highland on Twitter at twitter.com/bgdnnewseditor or visit bgdailynews.com.