Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) beneficiaries, referred to as “members” in the industry, have long been left in the past, at least where consumer transportation conveniences are considered. Traditionally a population with lower smartphone ownership than is found in most other segments of the US, there has been little in the way of technological advancements to make managing their benefit more user friendly. Instead, they have been subject to struggles with long hold times with provider call centres and unfulfilled trips due to circumstances beyond their control.
At Veyo, we started work on a yet-to-be-released transportation management web app for this population in 2020. With smartphones becoming more and more accessible, and our facility-facing sibling, RideView, now available, improving the member’s user experience while riding with Veyo became a top priority.
Veyo's member app will bring a bevy of modern consumer transportation amenities to the NEMT market.
Patients relying on NEMT are used to having very little personal ability to manage their transportation. Every action from booking trips to cancelling or editing existing trips requires some other qualified person’s assistance Even if patients had access to these actions, they would need training to be able to execute them as desired.
Veyo’s Member App removes this friction wherever possible to give patients the access they desire. NEMT software is complicated out of a need to accommodate the most complex of scenarios, but the vast majority of trips are fairly simple. By catering to the latter in the Member App’s booking and cancellation flows, we were able to remove significant length and confusion from these processes to make them accessible to the untrained. The more complicated use cases will still require users to call in to the call centre, but by utilizing the information already entered by the user we were able to at least reduce the amount of time required on phone to complete these actions.
Veyo's member app gives users the freedom to cancel and dispatch their own trips.
By necessity, healthcare facilities, transportation brokers and providers, have had full access to member and trip information allowed by HIPAA for as long as NEMT has been around. However, members’ own access to their information has only been available through one of those entities. Direct, and by virtue of that fast, access has been fleeting.
We designed Veyo’s Member App to provide users with the same level of access to their information that we provide in RideView (once their identity has been confirmed). This means that members who use the app will have immediate access to things like driver location and phone number for in-progress trips, increasing the likelihood that they will be successfully picked up.
A view of some of the information newly available to users.