EPISODE 21- Southern Oregon’s Mobile Integrated Healthcare Program

In this episode of the Team Senior Podcast, Jamie Callahan talks with Sabrina from Mercy Flights’ Mobile Integrated Healthcare (MIH) team—a program changing how care is delivered in Jackson County, Oregon. MIH meets people where they are (home, shelter, even an encampment) to bridge gaps after hospital discharge, reduce ER visits, and coordinate real, on-the-ground help.

Sabrina explains:

• What MIH is (and isn’t): not medical transport, but treat-in-place, follow-up, and care coordination
• Who they serve: all ages—from newborns to 104—across all of Jackson County
• Services they provide: medication reviews, fall-risk & home safety assessments, point-of-care testing, EKGs, breathing treatments, diabetes support, referrals, and care team coordination
• How MIH partners with Home Health (not replacing it) and collaborates with hospitals, primary care, and mental health
• Their role in Mobile Crisis Response with Jackson County Mental Health after the launch of 988
• How to refer and get help: (541) 858-2637 or mercyflights.com → Services → Mobile Integrated Healthcare

If you’ve ever left the hospital with a thick packet and more questions than answers, this episode shows how MIH helps people heal safely at home—and keeps them from bouncing back to the ER.

📞 Team Senior: (541) 295-8230
📞 MIH direct line: (541) 858-2637
🔗 Mercy Flights MIH info: mercyflights.com → Services → Mobile Integrated Healthcare

Transcript

Team Senior Podcast - Mercy Flights Mobile Integrated Healthcare Program

Host: Jamie Callahan
Guest: Sabrina (Mercy Flights MIH Program)

Jamie: Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast. Our goal is to simplify aging. Society grooms us to plan for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement, where the rubber meets the road? Perhaps you've had a stroke, or you've been diagnosed with cancer, or maybe you're forgetting things and now you have dementia. That's our area of expertise, and we are here to share our insight. And now, the Team Senior Podcast.

Hi, this is Jamie, and I am so excited to introduce Sabrina. I had the pleasure of meeting Sabrina for the first time sometime in the last year. And she described a program to me that I had known a little bit about, but I definitely got to take a deeper dive, and I'm really excited to share it with all of you. Sabrina, share with us what Mercy Flights is doing. They have a brand new program. It's been around for the last little bit. Share with us all about it.

Sabrina: Thank you, Jamie. Thanks for having us. I'm very excited to be here today. So to share a little bit about Mercy Flights, we've been around since 1949. We are the first and only not-for-profit air ambulance company in Oregon currently, and we were developed in partnership with George Milligan, really trying to deliver and get patients that were in our community in Southern Oregon all the way up to Portland who needed a higher level of care. And that's how we started doing what's best for our community.

We continued to expand, and in 2016 we launched our Mobile Integrated Healthcare program, which I am lucky enough to be part of. I've been in love with the concept for many years now, and that work really takes patient care and our community members' needs care to the patient and meeting them where they're at.

Jamie: I love that. I love that. I'll share a funny story - a little bit of something that happened when I met Sabrina for the first time. I, of course, went into the meeting like I always do, wanting to help everybody as much as I possibly can. And I wanted to know how do we duplicate this program everywhere else, because it is amazing what this program is doing. The Mobile Integrated Health program in Jackson County has truly changed the game in terms of how people are served in their own setting.

When Mercy Flights expanded through the MIH program, I'm just curious to know what led to the initial launch of this program?

Sabrina: So we initially looked at it when we were working with our community members that really just had a lot - a high volume of calls for ER or 911 calls for service - and we're addressing our community member needs that were falling through the cracks. Not necessarily they didn't have the right medical care, but maybe just needed additional help.

And over the years we've expanded to now where we are now. We have our transition of care program to where we're following patients post-discharge from the hospital that wouldn't traditionally qualify for a home health program. We have where we're the second half of Jackson County Mental Health Crisis Team. We provide the medical arm of that. We also work with all ages. Our youngest has been zero and our oldest has been 104. Wow. It's been a wild ride, but we love it.

And we are working with those that have all sorts of comorbidities. So we work with those that have chronic disease or mental health or substance use, or a variety of all of them. And we work anywhere. So we go anywhere in the community. And it doesn't have to be a patient's home. It could be on the street corner, it could be in a shelter, it could be an encampment, but we can go anywhere.

Jamie: That's amazing. So we've established that the MIH program is not medical transport. While they're served under the same umbrella of Mercy Flights, they're not transporting people to the hospital. You did draw a little bit of a parallel with home health, though, where this can serve a gap where home health cannot. Talk to us about what you do that's different than home health and why this is important to know.

Sabrina: So we are different than home health. We are not looking to duplicate services. In fact, we will work right alongside home health if we need to. We've had some partnership and some collaborative approaches over the last couple of years. Our program is really designed to meet patients where they're at.

And necessarily to qualify for home health, I hate to put it this way, but they need to meet a checkbox to be able to qualify for it. Our program is anybody who... we work closely with Jackson Care Connect members who go inpatient, who have a certain disease process or age, we will follow up with them post-discharge. And our goal is to make sure they have everything they need to be treated at home. Everything they need to focus on their healing at home.

So we'll work with them to bridge that gap between them and their doctor. We'll do fall risk assessments, home assessments, safety assessments. We'll also... we are also integrated into the health system, so we can provide referrals, we can work with their doctors, their mental health providers, and let them focus on healing and we do the liaising.

Jamie: I love that. So give us an example. Let's take a scenario first where home health is maybe not appropriate. They don't need physical therapy and they don't need occupational therapy, but they're discharging from the hospital, and MIH is gonna come alongside them. Tell me what that looks like. Describe some cases that you would serve and how long can you serve in that role?

Sabrina: Okay. So we work with... our first interaction with most of our community members that we work with is normally in the hospital or their home. And so we will follow up with them. If they don't qualify for physical therapy or occupational therapy, we will walk alongside them to make sure they understand why they were discharged. I don't know about you, but if you've ever been handed a packet of paper after you had an emergency room visit to try to understand it, that's a bit much.

So we make sure they understand it, they understand if it's a new condition or chronic condition, how they can best manage it. Medication reviews. We do some point-of-care treatments, so allowing them to stay home. We do not take the place of wound care for home health. And then we also call their providers. We make sure we bridge that gap and let the provider understand what's happening in the home that might be impacting their health, and/or we do work with a handful of houseless folks and what's impacting them in the community.

Jamie: Got it. Got it. Okay. So you are not providing physical therapy and occupational therapy. We know that. I'm very clear on that. And you're helping at time of discharge, maybe to communicate back to their primary care and explain what the landscape of this landing back at their own residence looks like and how to best support them in being successful and not going back to the hospital. Correct. What are some hands-on things, like some healthcare-related things that you do for people in their home?

Sabrina: So it could be a variety of things. We could get a doctor's order, we can do point-of-care labs, we can do what they call an EKG, which takes a picture of the heart. We have some treatments for breathing treatments, diabetic treatments. We're expanding into more additional treatments such as diabetic titration or CHF treatments in home, delivering IV Lasix, monitoring them, and really just providing that real-time resource for them, and then also helping them understand how to use durable medical equipment. They might have been discharged with a walker because they've had a frequent amount of falls, and they may not know how to use it. So sure, we see that plenty of times.

Jamie: Let's say home health has been put in, and we know that they're gonna be getting physical therapy once or twice a week because they have physical therapy. Does that disqualify them from being able to work through you as well?

Sabrina: No, it does not. In fact, they can get the physical therapy, home health can do it, and then we can provide the other services that home health maybe not normally provides and/or they may not have the capacity to do it at that time.

Jamie: Got it. Okay. So let's talk about a little bit about how what you do through the MIH program differs from what Fire District Three is doing.

Sabrina: So it is a bit different. Fire District Three's program focuses on low-acuity 911 calls follow-up, and they can serve their service area where District Three is. And they really respond to low-acuity 911 calls. And so what we're doing is we are looking at expanding that into more of our services, but we're also, because we are integrated into the health system, we work with both Rogue Regional and Providence, where we can see their discharge orders, we can work with their insurance companies, and then we would provide the report back. So it's more of a longitudinal, long-term, 30, 45-day...

Jamie: Got it. And it also sounds like Fire District Three serves their footprint geographically, and they don't really come into the rest of the area. But you might be able to go into the area that Fire District Three serves if they're not able to provide a service that you provide?

Sabrina: That is true, and we do work collaboratively with them. There's a lot of our community members that need the additional assistance, and so if we're not able to do it and they're in their area or they're familiar, we can either... we can even tag team. So having that additional support for both agencies is normal.

Jamie: I know, I like... I wanna stop here for a second and just sing the praises of Jackson County because you guys have done such an incredible job of figuring out how to serve your community. In Josephine County, it's a whole different arrangement, and they do have something. The only thing that really exists there is either emergency services, like you're being transported to the hospital, or what is referred to as the lift assist program. And it is very burdensome to the fire departments because they have to send an engine essentially to get mom or dad off the floor. And they have to send the engine because in the unlikely event that there's a fire while that engine has left the station, they have to be able to leave right from there to deal with it.

Sabrina: Very much. Yeah.

Jamie: I can't... that's why when I met with you the first time, I remember saying, "Okay, how do we get this everywhere?" Sabrina kept me in check, which was really important, and she just essentially said, "This isn't easy." Fire districts have the ability to be a part of this or not be a part of this. It's essentially their choice. But programs like this are based largely in funding. So how does MIH fund this program through Mercy Flights?

Sabrina: So we initially started with a grant in partnership with Jackson Care Connect and Providence. And since then we've been able to get contracts with local payers such as Jackson Care Connect. We also have contract with the county to be the other half of the mobile crisis. And then we're always seeking grants. We really want to be able to extend this service to everyone and to everyone in our community. And we're not the only ones that are in this boat of having to seek grants to start these programs, but we're definitely very collaboratively working in the community.

Jamie: Yeah. It's so important. Like you, we work with all different types of organizations, and it is so important to help folks get connected. Along the lines of getting connected, if somebody wanted to reach out to either... I would imagine it's one phone number that they funnel through. But I'm just curious. If I'm a citizen sitting in my living room right now and I hear this podcast, or I call Mercy Flights because I feel like I'm having an emergency, where... how does the call eventually funnel down to MIH?

Sabrina: So we have a couple different ways. We have referral pathways from the hospital and other community-based partners, but we also have a direct line I can provide. It's 541-858-2637. That's our direct line. And then of course, if you call our main Mercy line, we are on the phone tree. We also have a referral platform within our system at mercyflights.com, under services, under Mobile Integrated Healthcare, and they can always reach out to us. Right now we're Monday through Friday and we can try to take them in. All we need is the patient's name, our community member's name, date of birth. What the big gap is... we work with Hearts with the Mission - Hearts for Seniors - and they'll provide us referrals also.

Jamie: Sure. So what happens if someone calls on a Saturday?

Sabrina: Most of the time it goes to voicemail and we call them back first thing on Monday. We are looking at expanding our hours. When we initially started, we were seven days a week, but the resources and the volume... and so we really wanna make sure we put all of our efforts where it's most needed.

Jamie: Sure, yeah, that makes great sense. Let's talk about health professionals that are part of the MIH team. What kinds of health professionals do you have on board?

Sabrina: We are really lucky. We have a multidisciplinary team, so we have community health workers. We have two dedicated community health workers that help us provide additional support, but we have EMTs and paramedics currently that are specialty trained in mobile crisis response, mental health, mental health first aid, chronic disease education, treat in place. Yeah, there's not much we don't train in. And if we... the unique thing about a Mobile Integrated Healthcare program is it's adaptable for our community's needs. So as our community's needs continue to grow, we'll continue to add services.

Jamie: So it sounds like they are trained differently or additionally to your typical 911 transport calls?

Sabrina: Yes. It's additionally. It's additionally.

Jamie: How do you coordinate with primary care physicians, EMS dispatchers, local healthcare providers? Do you have direct lines of communication with them?

Sabrina: Yeah, we do have direct lines of communication, but we also have secure messaging. So both with Asante and Providence systems, and then traditional telephone call - we'll call and ask to talk to the MA for the provider, or even a lot of times the provider will get on the phone to try to get the report from us and see what's going on.

Jamie: Very nice. Very nice. So I wanted to discuss just a couple of specific things. So let's say that you are getting wound care through home health, but it is a Saturday. Home health hasn't been there for three days, and your bandage is falling off. Saturday's not a good... good plan because you're not there Saturdays and Sundays. So let's say it's a Monday, home health hasn't been there for three or four days, isn't scheduled to be back for another two or three days. They need the bandage checked, maybe the wound dressed. Can you help with that?

Sabrina: We can. We can help with it. We can do basic wound care where, again, we're not gonna take the place of everything that home health is doing, but we will help bridge that gap.

Jamie: And how about chronic disease management? Let's say that somebody... maybe they are struggling with... I can't even think of an example. Give me an example of something.

Sabrina: Diabetes.

Jamie: Okay. Yeah, diabetes. But what would they be struggling with? Obviously they're probably managing it with insulin. If their insulin's super low or super high, that's probably a transport to the hospital, or is that something you can help with?

Sabrina: It is something we can help with, and believe it or not, we get a lot of calls through 911 for either high or low blood sugars for those who have diabetes. And we've worked with quite a few community members over the past few years over it. But what we focus on is how do you manage it? What's your sliding scale? Dosage, what can you do that creates a high or a low?

If a community member calls with low blood sugar, they can get their blood sugar up, but then they can also refuse transport, which happens a lot. And what happens at that point is there's a gap. What is happening in the community doesn't actually make it to the primary care providers because those electronic health records aren't linked together, and so we can provide that. And it might be you might need to see your endocrinologist sooner, or they need to adjust your medications. Or a lot of times with the continuous glucose monitors, they need to be adjusted.

Jamie: Sure, absolutely. Let me give you a scenario that happened, actually I think it might have been last week. I'm just curious to know if this is something that I could have just phoned MIH and asked if this is something you can help with.

So a lady called, and she initially was inquiring about caregiving because she's forgetting to take her medications. She recognizes that she doesn't feel good when she doesn't, and sometimes she's taking too much of what is in the bottle 'cause it's not in a medi planner. So I said, "Okay, so if we could get somebody to help you on a weekly basis to put your meds in a medi planner, would you remember?" And she said, "No, because sometimes when I walk by them on the kitchen counter, I still forget to stop and take them."

So we started like a little bit of a deeper conversation around: What tools do you have at your disposal in your home? Do you have a cell phone? Do you know how to use your cell phone? If we set alarms on your cell phone, both of the times of the day that you're supposed to be taking your medication, would that help you? And she said, "Absolutely, yes."

So the way that this ended up going is that we were able to reach out to the caregiver registry and get somebody on board to go there once a month to fill her medi planner, assuming her meds don't change, and then help her set those alarms in her phone. But that was something that she had to pay for out of pocket. Exactly. So I'm wondering if this is something that the MIH program could help with?

Sabrina: Yeah, we definitely can. And we have helped with that in the past. And that is a common outcome - set the alarm, find the pill planners, do it either weekly or nightly or whatever works best for the patient. And again, that's the unique thing about it is just like you did, you came up with unique care plan just for that community member, but now we are gonna make it easy for her to do.

Jamie: Yeah, that's amazing. And I love having that as a resource because I honestly didn't know what to do. Like clearly you don't need caregiving, which is what she originally thought that she needed. And she doesn't have a lot of money to spend. She just needs somebody to help her. But in this day and age, I don't even think under the Medicaid umbrella that I could get somebody to go and do that. But it's amazing knowing that you guys can do that.

Sabrina: Yes, we can. Yeah. That's outstanding.

Jamie: What about fall prevention? What do you guys do for that?

Sabrina: That has grown quite a bit. In fact, about three years ago we worked with OHSU students to look at falls in our community and figure out how we do a better fall assessment. We were using a traditional one that meets all the checkboxes, but we really needed to work within our community. We have rural, we have urban, we have frontier, and so we do a full fall risk assessment. We do the traditional timed up and go or the steady fall, but then we also do an assessment that looks at the home from the outside in and the inside out, and then identify anything that could cause them to trip, such as an oxygen tubing on the floor or a rug that comes up. And then we'll work with... we'll fix what we can, but we're not contractors. But then we'll work with our community partners to help address any of those other needs.

Jamie: Very nice. Who do you work with? Do you work with Rebuilding Together The Rogue?

Sabrina: Yes. Okay. I love that. Kendall's wonderful.

Jamie: Yeah, they're wonderful. We work really closely with them as well. Okay, so let's talk about that fall prevention kind of assessment that you can do. Can you do that in the entire Jackson County footprint?

Sabrina: Uniquely enough, our program does serve all of Jackson County.

Jamie: Oh. That is amazing because I actually get calls on a semi-regular basis. We're talking probably every other week regarding this exact request. It's not always Jackson County though. We serve all four Southern counties, so you never really know where those are gonna come from.

We talked a little bit about how it's funded. Are there any parts of this that aren't directly paid for through MIH? Are there any parts of this where people need to be aware of specific parameters around their Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, anything like that?

Sabrina: No. What we'll do is if we get a referral, we always triage it, see who's involved with the care team, if they have a care team, what their insurance is, and then we will make the best next steps. It could be they could be established with X insurance, but that insurance company has their own care team and really... yeah, not because they're not boots on the ground, because they're not seeing what's going on in the home. We'll actually provide that information to them and help do that wraparound care. It might be one intervention, or it might be one, two, three interventions. It really just depends.

Jamie: Are you limited on the types of environments that you can go into? So you could go into a foster home, like an adult foster home and help?

Sabrina: Correct. Could you go into an assisted living?

Jamie: We try not to go into the assisted living only because we don't wanna confuse... that the patients, but no, we can go anywhere. And when I say anywhere, it could be 12.5 miles up Tillman Creek Road, 400 yards off the... up the hill to help a gentleman in a tent. We serve all of Jackson County.

Jamie: Wow. Okay. That is really impressive. Okay. Measurable success. How do you guys measure that this program is successful? I think it's obvious just from talking to you right now, but do you have things that you put in place to know?

Sabrina: We do. We track through reduction of ER visits, 911 calls, or even hospital readmissions and all the traditional patient satisfaction scores. But we also ask patients their perceived improvement of health. So they'll give us a rating when we first start working with them and then after where they're at. And we don't ask right when we're done with them, we follow up with them 30 days after. It also gives us a chance to follow up to see if there's anything else they need.

And then we also look at provider satisfaction with those that we work with in the community. We'll send out a survey. We look at engagement with primary care and other services, and then we also look at completed social determinants of health referrals and closed-loop communication. So that is a big one for us. We really work strongly with a lot of our community partners, so we wanna make sure those that we're working with are getting the right services and they don't continue to fall through the cracks. And then on top of the numbers, we love the stories.

Jamie: Oh, I'm sure. Those are the best, I'm sure. Yeah. Just being able to witness the improvements in somebody's quality of life, I'm sure is worth it a hundred times over again.

Sabrina: Yeah.

Jamie: Let's talk about the mental health piece for a second. And I'm asking this question because I recently... I mean, we come across folks from time to time that we recognize have some very serious mental health issues. And you mentioned that you're working in that area some. Tell me what that looks like.

Sabrina: That is probably one of my most exciting... I love the whole program, but we started in 2022 with the partnership with Jackson County Mental Health after 988 was launched in July that year, and we really built our program uniquely to what our community needed. So we worked with all of our community stakeholders, and that included law enforcement, other mental health providers, and those most importantly with lived experiences to find out how they would want to be responded to if they were in a crisis.

So we launched our program in 2022, September, and that team is our Mobile Integrated Healthcare team that is cross-trained, upskilled, and receives a significant amount of additional training and Jackson County Mental Health crisis team who has their own set of specialty. And so since then we'll go out, if a call comes in through 988, we're working to expand it with 911. And if someone's in crisis and we go and respond to that call real-time. And so we'll provide the mental health assessment, we'll also provide the medical assessment, 'cause not everybody having a mental health crisis is truly having a mental health crisis. It could be diabetes, it could be Alzheimer's, it could be something else, or their medications. So we work really closely with them to ensure they're getting the right care.

Jamie: Yeah, that's amazing. So we had... we have two cases in our wheelhouse right now. One is in Josephine County and one is in Jackson County. The one in Josephine County actually didn't come on my radar until after the incident had already happened. But an elderly woman who's in her eighties attempted to commit suicide. It was brought to my attention the next day, and I was able to go and visit with her in the hospital. And through just holding her hand in casual conversation, the hospital essentially babysitter person that's waiting in the room with them gathered a ton of information just through that casual conversation that I had with her.

Learned that she had an executor of her will. She had a power of attorney. She had a dog locked in her house. Her house was unlocked. All of these things that we were able to help mitigate. She left her cell phone there, so we were able to send staff to get her cell phone to call her family and let them all know that she was okay. And then support her through the process of going back home again, just in trying to show her that there is a road to quality of life, even though it's not what has been previously for her. She'd lost her eyesight, which didn't allow her to work the stock market at her desk, which is where she earned a supplemental income. And she has been accustomed to very nice things in her life. And then she's lost the grip in her hands. So she didn't have the ability to garden anymore, and she just gave up. She just decided, "I don't wanna do this anymore."

So supporting her through getting back home and then trying to show her that there is a path to quality of life that might not look like what it looked like before, but you have these folks that are here to wrap around you. The case in Jackson County is very different. It is a woman that clearly has some mental health issues. She needs to sell her home. It's a manufactured home, which isn't worth very much money, but I would deem her as not having capacity to make the decision to sign a contract with a real estate agent, even though she doesn't technically have the dementia diagnosis right now.

So you take this particular person who is not safe at home, cannot get food for herself right now, and we are bringing her food on a regular basis because she has no other means of even properly feeding her cats because she doesn't know how. This is a very messy situation, and there are a lot of hands involved in this. Adult Protective Services, the Department of Human Services, the ADRC social case management from the Rogue Valley Council of Governments, all kinds of people, all hands on deck with this. But the sad thing is that because the qualification to Medicaid hinges on her being able to provide a lot of information that she doesn't have the mental capacity to provide, she's in an unsafe holding pattern right now. And without having folks that can help her... I'm putting this scenario on the table because I'm wondering if this is something that the MIH program could help assist with as well.

I feel like there are so many hands in the pot right now, but at the same time, Team Senior, without us, she literally would not have food. Right now, the Department of Human Services is not bringing her food. APS, because she doesn't have a dementia diagnosis, their hands are tied, they won't do anything. It is a mess. So these cases are not unfamiliar to us.

Sabrina: These cases are not unfamiliar to us. In fact, we just wrapped up one and it was... we worked with another agency to ensure this gentleman is now secure in his home for the next two years. But again, the same thing. He had to prove that he qualified financially. He also has a mental health diagnosis, so we walked alongside him. In fact, we worked with him for almost a year on and off just to ensure he had what he needed to be successful. And my teammate was actually talking to him today. So yeah, we can assist with that.

And then one of the unique things that we can do is we don't ever wanna duplicate services, but we also want everybody to come together. And sometimes when there are so many hands in or hands in the pot, it gets confusing on who is doing what. And so we really try to collaborate, make sure that is happening, things go smoothly, 'cause that is the only way we're gonna be successful instead of everybody tripping over each other.

Jamie: Sure. I could not agree more. In fact, I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but we have launched our nonprofit New Age Oregon purposely for the purpose of serving folks that are in this gap. They're not on service yet with Medicaid, or they are in the gap and they're not even gonna qualify for Medicaid long-term care services, but they don't have enough money to receive services that they need, including housing, and how to come alongside them. And it sounds like you guys are doing an amazing job of a lot of that in Jackson County, but there isn't anything like this in Douglas County or Josephine County?

Sabrina: No. There are agencies... Mobile Integrated Healthcare, their concept has been around for a while. And there are agencies. One of my other hats I wear is I'm the chair of the Oregon MIH coalition. And so there's about 18 agencies in Oregon right now that are trying to launch these programs and are doing it collaboratively. But I, last I checked, there was not anything in Douglas County and neither with Josephine County, and just because it's the extra training or the man hours or workforce shortages, but we're really trying. Yeah. Not only as Jackson County, but as the state to bring these services everywhere.

Jamie: It's so necessary. Even if you just talk to the fire chiefs, either in the rural settings or in the city settings. Let's just take Josephine County and Grants Pass, for example. If you go and ask them, "What's the number one thing that's taxing your department right now?" without fail, hands down, they all say the Lift Assists program. It causes more injuries, it costs more to the department. Like all the things. You think that it would be a no-brainer to, even if you cannot emulate the entire MIH program, that they would be able to launch something that is similar that can remove the burden through EMTs and various other things but equip them with the proper things to get people off the ground so that we have fewer injuries, all the things that I'm sure you guys are doing. My cap is, it should be everywhere. Everybody should be able to have this care. But again, it's really just what's available in that community. And that's what I love about MIH, 'cause everybody, every community's different. Our program's completely different than Portland Fire's community MIH program, but it is all adaptable for their needs.

Jamie: I love that. What is your vision for MIH moving forward?

Sabrina: Oh, I always get myself in trouble when I say that. I would love to see, as my hat for MIH, I would love to see these services available all over Oregon and the nation, but for us in Jackson County, I would love to see us continue to expand and to ED in the home. Help divert some of the 911 calls or emergency rooms. Help patients discharge from the hospital sooner, do hospital at home, more telemedicine. And ultimately, I would love to be able to have a... full-time, not full-time, but even once or twice a week out in our rural communities. We get to go out and do some vaccine clinics during flu season, and as fall approaches. And that's probably one of my favorite, 'cause we really get to work with those that aren't coming into Medford. They're going into town, but it's not Medford.

Jamie: Sure. Last year we gave a vaccine to a gentleman who was 96, the flu and COVID, and his son was 72. I also flew in COVID and we went down for a resource fair. It was, but we were providing the vaccines and he said, "We weren't gonna come till you... we found out you were gonna be here to get these vaccines, 'cause we would never be able to get into town to get them."

Sabrina: Oh my gosh. Yes. And I would love to see just doing more of those. But again, what's my capacity and how many clones can I make?

Jamie: I completely understand that sentiment more than you can possibly know. Yeah. So before we close up here, I'm just... I want listeners to know if they wanna learn more, if they want to refer someone to the MIH program. If you're hiring, share us all the things that you've not already shared.

Sabrina: Yeah, so we are... we're not hiring currently, but we are looking to expand next year. So there's always applications or advertisements for jobs that go out on all the Indeed sites. But you can go to mercyflights.com under services, under the Mobile Integrated Healthcare. There is a place to put in a referral. Can always give us a call at Mercy Flights or, you could just reach directly out to me. I have no problem talking about this program with anybody.

Jamie: I love that. Yeah, I will agree. Sabrina's pretty accessible, and it's remarkable considering her position, not just at Mercy Flights, but also with the coalition statewide. Anything else that you want us to know about the program?

Sabrina: No, I... no, I think that covers it all. I could talk for hours, but I also really appreciate all the work that you do and your team does, and we've worked collaboratively on a couple patients and the outcomes are just phenomenal to me.

Jamie: Thanks. Yeah, we appreciate that. Alright, Sabrina, thank you so much for being here. We're gonna wrap it up. This is Jamie, and we will talk to you again next week.

Thank you for listening to the Team Senior Podcast. We're here every week sharing new and relevant information. Remember that we're just a phone call away. Team Senior can be reached at 541-295-8230. Again, 541-295-8230. Until next time, this is Jamie Callahan.