Team member stories: How Mobile Integrated Health helps Luke Estes meet patients where they are

“As a paramedic, you’re taught that you take people to the hospital,” said community paramedic Luke Estes. “You treat, you stabilize and you take them to the hospital. Community paramedicine flips that around by responding and treating right then and there.”

The Mobile Integrated Health Program through Prisma Health offers a shift in perspective from the traditional idea of paramedics taking patients immediately to a hospital. Instead, MIH providers are clinical paramedics who are able to work with patients to understand the barriers they may face to receiving care and connect them with what they need without using emergency medicine resources. 

“The MIH team is now 20 people strong, based in our headquarters here in Easley and serving four counties,” said Estes. “Who would have thought in 1999 that I’d be using ultrasound in a skilled nursing home as a community paramedic?”

Technology advances, and our Mobile Integrated Health team works hard to ensure that our community members facing significant obstacles to care are better able to access it.

“We just say, ‘how can we help?’ Let’s find it,” said Estes. “I get to help people, right?”

Mobile Integrated Health Program offers a shift in perspective. It’s one more way Prisma Health has stepped out of the box of traditional care to find new ways to help, to heal and to be here for good.