2026 Building Business Winner
The Building Business award honors a business that has driven significant economic growth, based on the entrepreneurial spirit of those who take risks and invest time and money to grow businesses and jobs.
The 2025 honoree started small right here in Terre Haute. The founder’s philosophy was simple: see a problem, build a solution and never stop improving.
Today, Trans-Care Ambulance Service provides healthcare services across three states — Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. They employ over 600 professionals, operate more than 100 ambulances, have traveled millions of miles, and transported nearly 100,000 patients every year.
That's the scale of the organization today. But the story behind it starts much smaller.
In 1992, Russell Ferrell founded Trans-Care in Terre Haute with a single wheelchair van serving skilled nursing facilities across the Wabash Valley. That philosophy built an EMS organization from the ground up into a full ambulance service and steady expansion into surrounding counties.
It also built a culture of practical innovation: early investment in computerized dispatch and electronic patient care reporting, and an in-house service center to build and keep specialized ambulances on the road.
That same instinct produced the One Call transportation model, giving hospitals a single trusted partner for care coordination, a model that went on to support the VA and save taxpayers millions while improving service for veterans.
Their growth has extended across the state, into Lafayette, Columbus, Knox County, Vincennes, Southern Indiana and the Louisville market. In recent years, that growth has continued deliberately and strategically, expanding into Kentucky and, just this past October, into Ohio with the acquisition of First Care Ambulance, bringing the AMS family into its third state.
But ask the Ferrell family what they're proudest of, and it isn't the fleet size or the transport numbers. It's the people, employees who've stayed twenty, thirty, even thirty-five years and a culture that invests in the workforce that makes all of this possible.
More than three decades after that first van started transporting patients, Trans-Care remains what it's always been: family-owned, Terre Haute-rooted and built on the belief that solving hard problems and earning trust is what building a business is really about.
We congratulate Russ Ferrell, Trans-Care and the AMS family of companies on the Building Business award.