SAVVY BUSINESS

The Rescuer
Jeff Tolbert has built AirMed International into an international giant in the air ambulance industry. His latest location: Hong Kong.

By Joe O'Donnell
Patience is the first business lesson learned in Asia.

Jeffery Tolbert, whose company AirMed recently became the first U.S. air ambulance company with a permanent base in Asia, learned that lesson early on when his company began seriously looking at developing a base of operations in Hong Kong. “A closing mentality is the kiss of death in China. Business there is all about relationships. You have to take your American businessman hat off and be patient. The Chinese want to know more about the individual, not the deal. Build a relationship and business comes later,” Tolbert says.

Tolbert sees the vast potential of the Chinese market as a ripe territory for American business. “They really want our know-how and they are prepared to pay for it,” Tolbert says, citing potential for American skilled labor and professionals in the healthcare, manufacturing and engineering disciplines.

With Asia and particularly China at top of mind with the Beijing Olympics underway in China’s capitol this month, Tolbert and AirMed’s experience in penetrating the Asian market is illuminating.

The company began forays into the Chinese market last July at the request of U.S. corporate customers of AirMed who asked the company to make an investment in the world’s fastest-growing economy. The decision to invest was also driven by the prospect of a large market underserved in the medical evacuation and air ambulance services.

Back in the spring, AirMed’s Asian base of operations opened in Hong Kong. A Hawker 800 long-range aircraft was purchased to be permanently housed at the Hong Kong base.

While based in China, this newest Hawker aircraft is U.S. registered and will be operated by U.S. licensed flight crews and staffed with We s t e r n - trained medical crews— meeting the same exacting standards as AirMed’s 10 other aircraft currently operating in the United States. Each plane is permanently equipped to provide a state-of-the-art intensive care unit environment and is used exclusively for medical evacuation.

With AirMed’s growing reputation, the company routinely flies transports for Fortune 500 companies, world-renowned hospitals, international assistance companies and foreign governments. AirMed, fully accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems, is a preferred carrier for the U.S. Department of Defense. The company plans more expansion announcements in the coming months along with additions to its fleet of aircraft.

The company won the 2007 International Travel Insurance Journal’s Air Ambulance of the Year Award and flies more than 2,000 transport missions each year. Chosen as the fixed-wing transport for the renowned Mayo Clinic, AirMed operates a fleet of customized fixed-wing aircraft from its headquarters in Birmingham and its additional bases in Honolulu, Cleveland, Rochester, Minn., and Hong Kong.

The Chinese expansion is the latest in a string of successes for AirMed. Company founder Tolbert is one of the pioneers of the air ambulance industry, and while his Chinese connections moved into hyperdrive in the past year, his Asian credentials extend much deeper. Back in 1989, Tolbert’s second air ambulance flight involved transporting an employee of an engineering company back to Birmingham from China, where the employee had experienced a heart attack. Tolbert’s longest flight involved picking up a merchant marine in Brazil and flying him back home to China for treatment.

In 1983 Tolbert flew the Southeast’s first heart transplant donor to UAB; began plans for permanent air ambulance operations. Four years later he was the first in the U.S. to operate civilian jet aircraft equipped exclusively for medical transportation and also operate the first civilian aircraft equipped with a medical liquid oxygen system.

Tolbert set the world record for a nonstop flight in a Boeing 737, logging 6,854 nautical miles in 14 hours and 12 minutes.

In 1991, Tolbert pioneered the concept of offering medical air-evacuation membership coverage to U.S. citizens and corporations after a client suffered financial hardship paying for his son’s evacuation from Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, he founded the Birmingham-based company, Medjet. In 1998, this company split into two distinct companies, Medjet Assistance (also based in Birmingham) and Medjet International, with Tolbert heading up the latter. Medjet International was renamed AirMed International LLC in 2003. It is privately owned and operated.

The company’s Birmingham headquarters at Liberty Park houses its administrative staff as well as a state-of-the-art center that tracks AirMed operations all over the globe from a logistical, medical and administrative perspective.

AirMed operates two distinct lines of business: a fee-for-service air medical transport service and a prepaid membership program called AirMed Traveler. Both provide air ambulance services to patients anywhere in the world. AirMed is also available embedded within certain insurance programs offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama.

“The challenge in growing our business is educating consumers that they have a void in coverage and building the awareness that they need this service,” Tolbert says. “The AirMed medical team assumes medical care at the releasing hospital, continues appropriate medical care to the aircraft via ground transportation and during flight, and admits the patient to the receiving hospital. All of this is available 24 hours per day, every day of the year.

“An AirMed membership uniquely brings patients to a hospital of their choice, not to the “nearest appropriate facility” as is the case for most travel insurance programs, health plans, other air medical companies or premium card services. AirMed memberships begin for as little as $95 with no out-of-pocket costs or copays, no financial limitations and no ‘medical necessity’ requirements. Medical evacuation coverage has never been more important,” Tolbert says.

Tolbert’s challenge with his company’s expansion into China is to relay that message to a newly mobile and increasingly affluent market of 1.3 billion people. “One of our unique challenges in China is to educate the consumer about what superior service is in healthcare,” Tolbert says.

For AirMed that education sometimes includes the delicate task of mediating between the traditions of western and Chinese medicine. That kind of mediation, just like a 20-hour flight, is all in a day’s work for AirMed International.
August Birmingham, Alabama

  

 
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