Client Spotlight: Rural Metro Corporation

By Ralph Hooper, Director of Client Services, San Rafael, CA

One evening in 1948, Lou Witzeman watched in horror as his neighbor’s house was consumed in flames because there was no fire protection for his small, unincorporated community. Lou pooled some money, bought a fire truck and set up a four-man fire department. He went door to door asking his neighbors to pay an annual fee for fire protection. As he would later say, “There was no master plan in forming the company; I simply needed fire protection for my neighborhood and I was determined to get it.”

In 1951, his company signed its first major fire protection contract with the newly incorporated city of Scottsdale, AZ. Ambulance and other emergency services soon followed. From Lou’s initiative, his sense of responsibility and his entrepreneurial spirit has emerged Rural/Metro Corporation, a leading provider of emergency and non-emergency medical transportation services, fire protection and other safety-related services to municipal, residential, commercial and industrial customers. The company has annual revenues in excess of $500 million, more than 8,000 employees, serves approximately 400 communities and responds to more than one million calls for assistance each year. The company provides exclusive 911 ambulance service in hundreds of U.S. cities and counties. Major communities served by the company include Scottsdale and Tucson, AZ; San Diego, CA; Denver, CO; Indianapolis, IN; Lexington and Louisville, KY; Omaha, NE; Cincinnati and Cleveland, OH; Nashville, TN; Salt Lake City, UT; and Bellevue, Seattle and Tacoma, WA. The company serves hundreds of smaller and rural communities with limited resources.

Rural/Metro’s customer base covers the gamut of emergency service needs.

Rural/Metro forms entrepreneurial partnerships with its community and health service clients, crafting innovative solutions to each client’s unique needs. Lou recalls, “Soon I began to realize that I had stumbled onto something. I found that the established ways of providing services were not as efficient as they could be. Rural/Metro’s cause became to look for new and better ways to do the job, for less money.“ Lou encouraged creativity and explored a wide range of methods to meet each of his clients’ particular needs. This passion to meet each customer’s unique requirements sets Rural/Metro apart from its competition and makes RSG and Rural/Metro a particularly good fit.

Rural/Metro became an RSG client in early 2007 and was directly implemented on the new Oracle^® platform. RSG loads TPA-handled claims monthly while the client also directly enters in-house claims. The company tracks claims with Sigma Encore^SM and uses SESM Reports and Oracle^® Discoverer to provide a full range of claims administration and risk management reports and analyses.

With more than a million emergency and non-emergency transports a year, it is critical that Rural/Metro closely monitors risk and safety issues. With the guidance of Kurt Narron, Rural/Metro’s Managing Director of Risk Management and Insurance & Benefits, RSG has crafted a series of custom reports based on claim and exposure data that tracks key labor and financial performance indicators throughout Rural/Metro’s operations. Kurt describes the finished product with enthusiasm: “To help ensure Rural/Metro maintains a world-class risk management program, our company has selected a variety of key performance indicators, or metrics, to track our performance. RSG’s product has created the opportunity for us to accomplish this daunting task with the touch of a button.”

The next time you see an ambulance racing to a nearby hospital or a fire truck responding to an out-of-control blaze, recall Lou Witzeman’s resolve over half a century ago. You may well be watching a prominent RSG client hard at work.

RSGreen

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