New ambulance contract signed with Grady EMS

Published 8:00 am Friday, July 22, 2016

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — Officials with Oconee Regional Medical Center in Milledgeville have decided to do business with a new ambulance service.

Hospital representatives recently made it official when they offered a contract to officials with Grady Emergency Medical Services of Atlanta.

Steven Johnson, interim chief executive officer of ORMC, made an announcement about the new ambulance service contract during Wednesday night’s hospital board meeting.

“We have signed the agreement with Grady for our EMS contract,” Johnson said. “We took that action last month.”

Johnson publicly thanked hospital board attorney Thomas Hyuck for his work on the legal end of helping make the new ambulance contract with Grady EMS a success.

Grady EMS will officially take over the ambulance service in Milledgeville and Baldwin County on Oct. 1, Johnson said.

For the past nine years, ambulance service to local residents and others in the city and county had been provided through a contractual agreement with The Medical Center of Navicent Health Emergency Medical Services in Macon.

Earlier this year, four different ambulance companies, including Grady EMS and Navicent Health EMS, made presentations to local hospital board members and other officials.

It wasn’t long after Grady EMS’s presentation that the company was awarded a letter-of-intent to become the new ambulance service provider.

Recently, officials with Grady EMS made another presentation to local hospital officials, and announced that they already had spent more than $500,000 to purchase five new ambulances to serve the estimated 46,500 residents who live in Milledgeville and Baldwin County.

“This is a really nice looking ambulance,” Johnson said, as he and other board members viewed a color drawing of what the new local ambulances would look like when Grady takes over the service in less than three months.

Instead of the ambulances being marked to represent a hospital in Macon, the logos on the new ambulances will feature the lettering: Oconee Regional Medical Center Emergency Medical Service. The side doors will contain the word “Grady” with a red cross. The bottoms of the ambulances, which will be mostly white, will be checkered to represent the typical look of Grady EMS ambulances within their company fleet.