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In the first of two articles, James Paul Wallis looks at the role that hospital dispatchers play in the complicated issue of helicopter air ambulance ‘shopping’ in the US healthcare system, a practice that has potentially fatal consequences
Wherever a region is served by more than one helicopter air ambulance provider, there is the possibility for helicopter shopping to occur. Writing in a 2008 position paper for the Indiana Association of Air Medical Services (INAAMS), the Association’s President Rex J. Alexander defined helicopter shopping as: “…the practice of calling, in sequence, various operators until an operator agrees to take a flight assignment, without sharing with subsequent operators the reasons the flight was declined by the previously called operators.”
