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Scheduling a doctor’s appointment can be challenging. Getting to that appointment can be downright difficult. As Americans are getting older and driving less, health care providers are faced with a big problem: up to 50% of all medical appointments in the US are no shows. A no show is defined as an appointment that isn’t canceled but for which the patient simply doesn’t show up.
It is particularly true that barriers to safe and reliable transportation for senior citizens and the disabled have impacted their ability to get the care they need. Their options for transportation, if not carried out by a friend or loved one, have been price sensitive regional services and national rideshare companies, rarely given praise by the patients themselves.
Kerico Health Care, a Houston based Non-emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) company, is taking a different approach by focusing on the patient experience above all. Founded in 2018 by Michael Morris, a serial entrepreneur whose own experience of being unable to find reliable transportation for his ailing mother when she was being treated for cancer, was a wake up call. “I just didn’t trust some stranger in a rideshare to transport my mom across town and drop her off on the curbside of a medical building. And I knew that if I didn’t want that, and she didn’t want that, then millions of Americans were feeling the same way.”
Morris started Kerico with a new approach. Firstly, to partner directly with doctors’ offices to transport patients at their request. The clinic-as-the-customer approach wasn’t new per se, but Morris took it a step further. “I wanted to create a door-through-door service. We can literally help a patient from their couch to the vehicle, get them across town, help them into the doctor’s reception area, and vice versa for the ride home, and we track every movement via our care coordination team and our app.”
Chris Ochs, Kerico’s Chief Development Director expands on this. “What health care providers are recognizing is that it is common for an NEMT driver to spend more time with a patient than that patient will spend with their physician, and therefore the driver-patient interaction is of critical importance. The drive to and from the appointment is part of the patient experience. That’s why we train our drivers not just on safety, but on patient empathy and understanding.”
This approach for Kerico to become the gold standard for NEMT in the US is paying off. The company has grown 300% year-over-year due to its earning the trust of healthcare giants United Health Group and Houston Methodist. Morris shares his final thoughts. “When it comes to NEMT, we are moving from a price-conscious world to a care-conscious world. And it’s a beautiful thing when the patient, their families, and their doctors don’t need to worry about transportation the same way I did when caring for my mom. We’re heading in the right direction and are proud to lead the way.”
