Now that we have established what a transportation community is, let’s discuss the first step required in building one. This page will highlight some key steps needed to establish your transportation provider network.
1. Identify Your Goals
Start by identifying the goals you would like to achieve with a transportation network. This step is crucial for establishing appropriate expectations and KPIs with the transportation providers you approach. Here is an example theme and corresponding SMART goal:
- Reduce inpatient length of stay – Every extra hour that a patient is stuck in a hospital bed past the time of medical necessity costs the hospital
money and can negatively affect the patient’s satisfaction. A goal of many hospitals is to reduce the length of stay by reducing delays in accessing transportation for discharged patients.- Sample SMART Goal: Reduce the average written-order-to-discharge* time by 1 hour for all patients requiring transportation assistance.
- Written order to discharge* refers to the time the doctor writes the discharge order to the time the patient leaves the building.
2. List Out Your Requirements
After identifying your goals, you should list out what requirements you have for building relationships with new transportation providers. Some areas that you may want to prioritize are reliable arrival times, affordable rates, and/or vehicle service levels.
When listing your goals, use actionable and informative sentences like: “We need a transportation provider that can arrive at 90% of all pickups each month within 90 minutes of the requested ETA.”
* Note: It’s important not to forget the providers you have existing relationships with when establishing your network. You can reach out to your legal department to see if your hospital has any existing contracts or agreements in place with transportation companies. By downloading Roundtrip’s Partnership Inventory Review template below, you can begin conducting an inventory of your organization’s existing relationships.
3. Determine Local Providers
The next step in establishing your provider network is to identify what other providers exist in the city/region where your hospital is located. From that list, begin performing outreach through phone calls or email. Here’s a general script you can use when contacting a provider:
4. Form Service Level Agreements (SLA)
When you have determined if the available provides meet the transportation goals you established, as well as being on the National Provider Identifier (NPI) Registry, you can begin forming agreements with the chosen parties. Work with your legal or compliance department to write up a Service Level Agreement (SLA). These include details such as the type of data to be tracked, accepted insurance plans, pricing structure by vehicle type, and more.
5. Choose Your Preferred Model
Now that you have chosen the providers in your community, it’s time to establish the model you will use to allocate non-emergency medical transportation contracts. Some examples of potential models — using automated computer-based ride-booking methods — are auto-assignment, preferred status, and round-robin.
For more information about creating your NEMT provider network and the various types of transportation models and merits, see our ebook.
To continue learning how to build your transportation community, check out our e-book.
