Excelling in the world of non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) doesn’t just mean getting every single health plan member to medical appointments, the grocery store, pharmacy, or other healthcare resources when they need to go—although that is obviously the most crucial part of our mission at SafeRide Health.
Being a strong NEMT partner also means providing a positive member experience, so those members feel good about their rides, they arrive at their appointments on time, and they get home without any trouble or lengthy delays. It means collaborating with our health plan clients, ensuring that every member gets the most appropriate ride at the right time, and that stakeholders have access to the right data so they can understand performance throughout the NEMT journey.
SafeRide recently completed a survey of health plan leaders and other healthcare professionals to find out what challenges their members face, what services can help overcome barriers to care, and where NEMT and social determinants of health (SDoH) fit into the ecosystem of care.
We discovered that addressing SDoH is a top concern among health plan leaders, and transportation is viewed as the most powerful tool for overcoming barriers to care. We also asked about areas where NEMT providers could improve, and “service” emerged above every other consideration, with 67% of survey respondents saying that service is an area needing improvement. Coming in second was “cost,” listed by 37% of those surveyed.
What exactly does service mean? To SafeRide Health, service refers both to how members access and experience their transportation benefit—from initial eligibility screenings and ride bookings to being picked up, transported, and dropped off to and from care—and to how we work with health plans to ensure that we deliver efficient, effective, and transparent transportation services.
Improving Service for Health Plan Members
At SafeRide Health, we want Medicare Advantage and Medicaid members to have a delightful experience when using their transportation benefit, from start to finish. That’s true whether they are scheduling and tracking their own rides via our member portal, or if their care navigator handles the scheduling of their NEMT rides. Some members feel empowered by taking their transportation benefit into their own hands, while others appreciate it when care providers, caregivers, and loved ones can schedule rides and keep track of benefits on their behalf. Our self-serve options make any of these options simple and effective for all types of rides, from wheelchair-accessible vans to rideshare vehicles. And unlike many other brokers, we offer on-demand service for both NEMT and rideshare rides, ensuring that members can get to and from those last-minute appointments.
We recognize that our call center representatives and drivers are on the front lines of customer service, so we provide extensive training to everyone in our call center and reward high-performing NEMT providers with financial and volume incentives. After every ride, members can rate their experience with customer satisfaction scores—our average ride rating is 4.8 out of 5 across all types of rides—and they can provide optional comments about their experience. We use those ratings along with other performance metrics to assign rides to the best-performing transportation providers.
When challenges or complaints do occur, we investigate and act quickly to prevent similar situations from happening in the future. With a network that is nearly 100% digitized, we’re able to solve those issues quickly. For example, when one member recently experienced a delay due to vehicle mechanical issues, she called a SafeRide customer service representative who was able to pinpoint her location using geo-mapping and send another ride to pick her up in under 30 minutes. The member was able to get home from her appointment without any further trouble.
SafeRide also works to ensure that detailed, accurate addresses are pinned within members’ records, and they can even request to have a favorite driver pick them up. “It has been years and years since I have had a driver who has been able to find the senior mobile home park that I live on the first try,” one member wrote after her first ride with a SafeRide transportation provider. “I am so hoping that she could be my driver again.”
Stories like these shows how much can go wrong in medical transportation. When these challenges occur, it risks the member experience and the likelihood that people will continue on their care journey. However, these same stories hit on our mission at its core, showing how, with better service, we can transform health outcomes for vulnerable populations nationwide.
Improving Service for Health Plans
NEMT brokers have not always had the best reputation, so we weren’t too surprised to see that only 47% of survey respondents said their current NEMT provider was meeting their needs. Another 27% said their provider was not meeting their needs and 17% were unsure. That’s a lot of potentially unhappy customers! Worth noting: Fewer than a third of the health plan professionals who responded to our survey were SafeRide Health customers. In fact, those survey respondents who said they were not SafeRide customers were nearly three times as likely to express dissatisfaction with their NEMT provider.
So how do we ensure that health plans get the best possible service? In addition to giving health plans access to industry-leading transportation implementation and program management support, we offer ongoing and quick visibility into a range of performance metrics on 80+ data points: fulfillment, on-time performance, call center responsiveness, complaints and grievances, modality, cost, and more. We don’t leave anything up to chance or lost in a fog of data.
The result has been a 99% client retention rate and clients that see SafeRide as partners—not just another vendor. While cutting-edge technology has helped fuel our growth, it’s also allowed our talented team to better focus on the human element of non-emergency medical transportation. Hopefully the rest of the industry is catching on, too.
Read SafeRide Health’s NEMT Survey Report for more insights and analysis about the industry today.