Be it a ride home from appointments or visiting a doctor, delayed arrivals aren’t preferable. The population living in underserved and rural areas, unfortunately, face a lot of wait time when it comes to transportation they can depend on. This can affect the health and well-being of people and impede the entire patient experience. The barriers to transportation directly correlate to challenges in healthcare accessibility. These barriers pave the path for delayed and missed appointments and medication requirements in care delivery services. Therefore, these consequences affect chronic illness mismanagement leading to below-average health outcomes.

For improving healthcare equity and overcoming these barriers, it is important to ensure safe, reliable, and easily accessible transportation management. When we collectively choose to break down these barriers, providing smooth transportation services to the underserved populations, can improve their quality of life. According to a study conducted by Logisticare in 2018,

58%⁠

of managed care members availing NEMT services wouldn’t have been able to make it to their appointments if NEMT solutions were unavailable.

Predictive analytics in healthcare has become a known entity serving to break down transportation barriers and prevent patients from the risks of readmissions or ED visits. With proper impact on transportation, improving patient satisfaction, lowering the costs of healthcare, and helping with better health outcomes.

Predictive Analytics in Healthcare and NEMT

Non-emergency medical transportation has been an advanced service in removing barriers to transportation via predictive analytics in healthcare. The high-tech NEMT platforms have given users more visibility into the operations of medical transportation services. Real-time tracking and feedback received can be of immense value when it comes to NEMT services. Predictive analytics in healthcare can offer high-level oversight in and across NEMT environments. It captures the experience of individual riders and keeps up with the transportation trends. Hence, providing necessary benefits to managed care organizations (MCOs).

The ideas from Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) can be extremely useful in building NEMT services. The ATMS are designed to remove the obstacles and problems caused by traffic. With NEMT services, the concepts are similar to that of ATMS, now with integrated predictive health analytics. It helps to make real-time decisions and has a positive impact on trips with patients. Predictive analytics in healthcare can assist in rerouting trips while on the go, allows trip changes, and decreases ride wait time for patients. Healthcare predictive analytics can assist in mitigating traffic congestions, analyzing rush-hour, and preventing accidents from occurring.

The real-time tracking capabilities in NEMT can help MCOs to correctly monitor trips and raise flags towards drivers who are late or no-shows. Transportation analytics allows providers to reassign a driver if the one assigned fails to show up. They can even assign trips to other vehicles in a similar area. Therefore, patients and members can reach their appointments on time with seamless transportation services.