ASHLAND — King’s Daughters Medical Center now has its own ambulance service.

The hospital has purchased the assets of the now defunct Portsmouth Ambulance Inc. and has hired many of the companies former employees.

King’s Daughters Medical Transports began operations about 10 days ago. The service will not be a primary first responder to 911 calls but will instead focus on interfacility transfers and other non-emergency type activities such as transporting patients to dialysis centers or home after an extended hospital stay.

KDMT has signed a local mutual aid agreement with Boyd County EMS and other agencies and will respond to 911 calls in the event all Boyd EMS ambulances are busy or if a mass casualty event occurs, officials said.

KDMC spokesman Tom Dearing declined to comment at what cost the hospital had acquired the 13 ambulances and ambulettes, which are smaller non-emergency vehicles. He said approximately 40 employees had been hired for the service but was uncertain how many were former Portsmouth Ambulance employees.

KDMC has hired Parastar Inc., a nationwide EMS management and consulting firm, to run the ambulance operations, Dearing said.

He said hospital officials became concerned about the ongoing troubles at Portsmouth Ambulance and saw an opportunity to step in to ensure vital transport services continued to be available to patients in the area.

“When we saw there was a possibility that ambulance service was going to significantly decrease in the area — something that is not good to any health care provider — we wanted to make sure that service remained intact,” he said.

“This is another exciting day at King’s Daughters,” said KDMC President and CEO Fred Jackson. “We can now bring our nationally recognized clinical quality and customer service to patients beginning at the point of transport.”

Boyd EMS Director Tom Adams praised the development saying he anticipates KDMT will be able to enhance the overall medical transport services available in Boyd and Greenup counties.

“I have met with them (KDMT) and their management company. We have discussed, in length, how we are going to work together as an overall system,” Adams said. “It’s not going to affect us in a negative manner. Portsmouth did have some issues that made them unstable and this should stabilize that service and hopefully should be able to provide a high quality service.”

He said each of the three ambulance services in Boyd County fill a particular niche and should work in concert to provide a comprehensive services to patients.

“What you end up with is a coherent EMS system across the board, from emergency situations to back home. Everybody works together in the long run for the patient,” Adams said.

Portsmouth Ambulance ceased operations earlier this month after its certificate of need for Boyd and Greenup counties was seized by the company’s creditors in a foreclosure action.

It is unclear how the company’s operations in Ohio have been affected — Ohio does not require a certificate of need for ambulance services to operate — but an attorney who represented the ambulance service in failed negotiations between it and KDMC said he believed they had stopped because they have no assets.

The company and its employees have faced a myriad of legal and financial problems in recent months and years. Portsmouth Ambulance is involved in at least two lawsuits in Ohio and on several occasions has not had funds available to pay its employees.

One such time was during the failed negotiations between KDMC and Portsmouth, according to J. Randall Richards, an attorney with the Columbus, Ohio based legal firm Chester Wilcox and Saxbe.

“In the interim for a period of time, when the bank started gathering the receivables, there was no money to pay employees,” he said. “The company struck a deal with King’s Daughters, who leased them back to Portsmouth so the employees continued to be paid.”

Richards said his involvement stopped when a shareholder dispute resulted in an injunction against the company selling its assets to the hospital.

“Once that happened the bank decided to take action itself and apparently started exercising its right and a short time after filed a foreclosure action,” he said.

KDMC later purchased the ambulances it now has from the bank along with the certificate of need.

Dearing said employees who applied and met the hospitals normal hiring standards were hired.

In January, an intent to purchase agreement between Portsmouth shareholders and competitor MTS Ambulance also fell through.

Portsmouth Ambulance was purchased in 2006 by an investment company, that was attempting to make the company profitable. The company is being sued by Medicaid in Ohio over payments it received from the agency between 2001 and 2005.

CARRIE STAMBAUGH can be reached at cstambaugh@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.