By Roshni Patel, Customer Success Manager, Royal Ambulance
Royal Ambulance is a California-based transportation company committed to connecting patients and providers in the healthcare continuum through transportation, technology and seamless experiences. We partnered with a medical insurance network in the San Francisco Bay Area focused on providing easier access to high-quality care with cost transparency. Roshni Patel and Royal Ambulance won the 2021 SAMA Excellence Awards in the category for “SAM as the Leader.”
Identifying Customer Roadblocks
When we first established our partnership with the insurance network, Royal was just one company among many servicing the network’s network of hospitals and doctors. Our customer sought a trusted transportation provider who could help them keep patients within their provider network, ensuring quality patient care at a lower cost to the health plan. Each hour a patient spends in a non-network hospital increases the cost to the insurance network significantly.
During the initial discovery phase with the customer, our team at Royal established a regular meeting cadence with the insurance network’s director of transitional care programs, with the goals of determining current barriers to keeping patients in-network and identifying and addressing inefficiencies in transportation ordering workflow.
Defining Objectives
Specifically, we collaborated with the insurance network to develop the following list of prioritized objectives:
- Leverage transportation to ensure patients receive care within the provider network.
- Reduce the overall financial costs to the health plan when a patient obtains care out-of-network.
- Decrease the time case managers spend on scheduling patient transport.
- Create a single transportation hub for medical and non-medical transportation needs to streamline and simplify transportation requests and provide the appropriate levels of transportation for patients’ needs.
- Educate case managers on how to triage appropriately for level of transportation based on a patient’s medical condition, reducing costs to the health plan or to patients who may be responsible for paying directly for transportation services.