There have been many socio-economic factors underlying in society related to patients and taking their care. There has been a major shift today that highlights the importance of value-based care for these individuals. This helps the providers to serve them with the best possible services during an emergency or non-emergency health outcome.
The patients did not have any access to comfort care transportation previously and these inefficient services were the root causes to think more about smoothening the services. There had been records of health systems addressing these issues with lesser efficiency in the earlier days. They had provided taxi voucher programs, shuttle services, and patient valet parking beside the ambulance services to account for medical transportation. However, these services did not prove to be enough beneficial as the providers were less and the medical transportation costs were very high. These vehicles also did not have enough scope to match the exact needs for every sort of medical ride. This is when the medical facilities started looking for innovative changes and solutions that would help solve these transportation problems and started looking out to partner with external medical transportation providers.
What was the problem?
Patients who had mobility issues always relied on transportation services for movement from their residence to hospitals or across hospitals to hospitals. Every patient had a different need and there was not enough data present that would quantify this lingering issue. But the lack of data did not prevent the medical facilities to address these issues readily. Organizations were swift enough to discuss these challenges while keeping certain aspects in mind:
•Health systems had always been spending a lot of finances to bring in innovative ideas about patient transport. This did not prove a lot beneficial as the facilities could not bring in a lot of savings for themselves.
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•Patients had always been missing out on appointments or rescheduling them due to the lack of available medical vehicles for their transport. This affects the facility’s operational issues where the patient throughput decreased, access to medication decreased, and administrative burdens on the staff increased. Besides these, the primary care department had to rely on the emergency department for serving the patients with transportation solutions.
•Most of the patients considered transportation to be a part of their medical experience and they started scoring the services they got from the facilities. But to understand it deeply, these are the patient services that are beyond the hospital’s control and the in-house administrators fall into trouble when these issues suddenly arise. The transportation needed to be brought under their direct control to have streamlined the experience.
•Facility staff always ensured to help the patients with the assistance needed during the transportation but they lacked the tools and equipment to do so.
The solutions to these issues
In recent times, healthcare facilities are partnering with external transportation management companies to render comfort care transportation services to the patients. This helps them to schedule and share rides and establish a solid framework to address patient grievances during the transits.
The ride management teams use process improvement technology that helped them to continuously review the entire rides, identify the problems within it, plan solutions that will work, implement the same, and review those applied solutions to check how effective they had been.
This led to the development of the “healthcare transportation hub” model by medical transportation providers. Here the coordinators can submit a single request and immediately book transportation for the patients from the dispatch centers. Any emergency cases would have ambulances sent for their necessary transit help with a team of experienced personnel. Patients not requiring emergency help were sent with NEMT vehicles that had all amenities to serve them, despite any emergency arising. And, any patient who did not require any considerable external medical help was given the option of sharing the ride with other patients of similar needs.
Without any significant help from the IT department, the teams were able to conduct a full rollout within 60 days. The drivers, assistants, and the users were all trained thoroughly based on different clinical factors and this, to the surprise of everyone, did not involve a huge medical transportation cost. This new program received overwhelming responses and both the staff and the patients were satisfied.
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Today, things have got streamlined for the better, and patients missing out on their medical appointments have decreased significantly, which indicates progressive development on both sides.
Author Bio
Secure Comfort Care is a pioneer in the field of comfort care transportation that assures no patient misses out on their medical visit due to lack of transportation. As leading medical transportation providers, we offer our services at a minimum medical transportation cost, assuring everyone gets to see a doctor without fail.
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