Dr. Tim Pieh drives the MD3 response vehicle Jan. 18 in Clinton. Pieh spoke to the Augusta City Council recently about funding for the MD3 program, which allows a physician to directly respond to emergencies in the field. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

AUGUSTA — A Kennebec County program that has doctors and their life-saving tools ready to respond when people are in need of major, immediate care has saved at least one life in its first 10 months, and studies show it could nearly double the chances someone survives cardiac arrest, an advocate for the program told city councilors this week. The program is about to run out of funding,

Dr. Timothy Pieh oversees the Kennebec County MD3 pilot program, which puts an emergency medicine physician on the road in an SUV equipped with much of the same medical equipment used in an emergency department to provide an elevated level of care in the field. He told Augusta city councilors Thursday studies have shown that having a physician on a team responding to emergency medical calls will save more lives compared to emergency responses without a physician involved.

Pieh cited incidents and data combined from 14 different studies, including more than 50,000 patients, that indicated patients suffering cardiac arrest saw nearly twice the survival rate, increasing from 8.4% to 15.1% when a physician responds to such calls.

Pieh said it’s hard to determine exactly how many lives the program has saved during its first 10 months of operation in Kennebec County, during which its physicians responded to 162 calls, because its physicians are generally working with a team of other emergency medical service providers. But, he said, there was at least one life directly saved when he intervened and revived a person in Waterville from cardiac arrest, and that patient lived and retained full mental functioning.

The program’s startup was funded by American Rescue Plan Act money received by the county. But this summer county officials cut funds from the budget to keep the program going another full year, agreeing to fund it only through the rest of this calendar year. The cut was part of reductions made to trim a county budget initially proposed to increase taxes by 44 %, which was eventually brought down to a budget that increased taxes by 28%.

Pieh said the 10-month-old program needs a budget of around $350,000 a year to operate at full staffing, with doctors on call five days a week during the busiest 911 call period, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Asked by At-Large City Councilor Abigail St. Valle what, if anything, he was asking for from the city, Pieh said his goal is to show the program provides a worthwhile return on investment as he looks to find funding sources to keep it going beyond the end of the calendar year, when its funding is expected to run out.

Dr. Tim Pieh is pictured at the scene of a fire on Leighton Road in Augusta in January. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Pieh said the cost for the program, on a budget of $350,000, would be $3 to $4 a year per county resident.

“And you get a physician five days a week, for 10 hours, that’s specially trained for out-of-hospital care, that will nearly double your (chances of surviving cardiac arrest), that is, in my mind, and maybe I’m biased here, a no-brainer,” said Pieh, who is an emergency department physician for MaineGeneral Medical Center and the Augusta Fire Department’s medical director. “I think it’s an incredible return on investment.”

The program started with three physicians, recently added a fourth, and is in the process of on-boarding two more. Physicians receive specific training to operate in the field, outside of the hospital setting.

They respond to the most critical cases, when someone is sickest and closest to death.

A major goal of the program is that physicians taking part in it also help train and educate the other emergency medical responders they work alongside, increasing the skills of responders. Pieh said a program goal is that its physicians will spend two hours of each of their shifts educating others.

In the program’s first 10 months its physicians spent 1,438 hours on call and responded to 162 emergencies. They also spent 130 hours teaching 492 students.

Pieh said they’re “hustling for funding” and showed a list of 10 grant programs applied for, including the $345,000 in ARPA funding it started with, $5,000 in annual funding from MaineGeneral, three grant applications currently being processed, and five that were denied, some twice.

Pieh has made similar presentations in other Kennebec County municipalities.

The program is rare for a rural area, Pieh said, and the first of its kind in northern New England, though they are commonplace in major American cities and in Europe.

A Maine Medical Center doctor occasionally joins the Portland Fire Department on calls, the only similar program in Maine.