What if transportation wasn’t a constant hurdle, but a strategic asset?
In many hospitals, patient transportation issues operate in the background until they create serious problems. Patients miss treatments. Staff waste hours coordinating rides. Discharges are delayed, and critical resources are tied up. Yet despite its impact, transportation rarely receives the same strategic attention as other parts of hospital operations.
For Memorial Hermann—a system coordinating roughly 65,000 patient movements each year—these challenges were personal. Transportation delays led to missed procedures, longer inpatient stays, and in some heartbreaking cases, prevented patients from returning home when it mattered most.
It became clear: patient transportation could no longer be treated as an afterthought.
Understanding the Scope
Early on, Memorial Hermann’s transportation challenges reflected a familiar pattern.
Each of the system’s 11 campuses managed its own transportation workflows. Staff booked rides using different processes and vendors. Case managers tracked prior authorizations manually. Transportation performance data, when available, came from the vendors themselves—making it difficult to verify reliability.
“We had all of these different silos that were managing transportation in a different ways,” said Adam Fitzhenry, Director of EMS Operations. “[Memorial Hermann] didn’t have any sort of centralized group to oversee how we manage transportation as an organization”.
Without clear ownership, transportation was everyone’s responsibility—and, in effect, no one’s.
“On the surface, we thought this was a resource management issue: more ambulances would mean more resources to solve the problem. But what we found out was that we had a process and workflow issue – not a resource one. More wasn’t better; more resources actually created greater frustration for our staff.”
~ Adam Fitzhenry, Director of EMS Operations
Building a Stronger Transportation Strategy
Recognizing the need for change, Memorial Hermann partnered with Roundtrip to develop a more coordinated healthcare transportation strategy. They started by focusing on five pillars that define successful hospital transportation workflows: Ownership and Process, Tech and Resources, Payment, Transportation Network, and Analytics.
Rather than attempting to overhaul everything at once, the team used the Transportation Maturity Model to guide their approach.
This framework allowed Memorial Hermann to assess their current state (largely ad hoc and reactive) and prioritize realistic steps toward a fully optimized transportation system.
Turning the Maturity Model into Actionable Steps
Memorial Hermann tackled each pillar of a successful transportation workflow in order to overhaul a fragmented system; they decided to:
- Coordinate transportation management to serve the entire health network
- Implement a centralized booking platform so they could streamline the ride request process
- Expand their transportation network beyond a single vendor, resulting in less risk and improved flexibility
- Improve the way they capture transportation data in order to better monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and drive continuous improvement.
- Restructure payment systems to ensure transportation expenses were authorized and reviewed.
As your organization advances through the maturity model, selecting the right KPIs becomes essential. These metrics help tell the story of your progress, quantifying the real impact of your efforts and turning operational improvements into measurable outcomes. It’s not just about tracking numbers; it’s about proving that the work you’ve done is making a meaningful difference.
Real Results for Patients, Staff, and the Health System
These changes delivered measurable improvements across the board.
Before the transportation redesign, 64% of surveyed staff reported being extremely dissatisfied with the transportation process. Just 60 days after the new workflows launched, that number dropped to zero. The work they invested in improving transportation “[had] made a tremendous impact in terms of how we move patients and how our staff feels about transportation.”
Patient flow improved significantly as well. At the pilot campus, emergency department holding times for patients awaiting transportation dropped by 50%.
Meanwhile, transportation costs fell as the system gained better control over vendor performance and payment management.
In short, Memorial Hermann proved that improving transportation is not just a logistical exercise—it’s a critical investment in patient care.
The Broader Lesson for Health Systems
Transportation is often overlooked in broader hospital strategy discussions, yet its impact touches nearly every part of healthcare operations.
An unreliable ride can delay discharges, extend hospital stays, reduce bed availability, and frustrate clinical teams working hard to deliver timely care.
Using a tool like the Transportation Maturity Model, health systems can start by asking simple but important questions:
- Who owns transportation today?
- Where are the major gaps?
- What data are we using to measure success?
Improving transportation does not require massive upfront investment. It requires focus, coordination, and a willingness to treat transportation as an essential part of operational excellence—not just a necessary service.