“Better care is less expensive than bad care.”
That’s how Alacura CEO Ken Van Cara made the case for active coordination of medical transport on a recent American Journal of Healthcare Strategy podcast with Alacura Chief Growth Officer Steven J. Fox and host Cole Lyons.
Medical transport is one of the last areas of healthcare that lacks guardrails and governance. The decisions that drive a transport get made in real time by parties whose interests don’t always align, and nobody is positioned to see or coordinate the full picture. The result is a fragmented process that often leads to surprise bills for patients, high costs for health plans, and clinical decisions that don’t always match the needs or best interests of the patient.
In the podcast, Ken and Steven explain how we got here with medical transport and walk through what a coordinated process actually looks like.
A few things to listen for include:
- How most medical transports aren’t the high-acuity emergencies people envision, and how that changes the decision-making around cost and clinical appropriateness.
- Why peer-to-peer interaction between clinicians is critical for finding the transport that best fits a patient’s needs.
- What independent dispute resolution (IDR) under the No Surprises Act has done to health plan exposure.
- How a patient-centered approach changes the experience for families when they’re at their most vulnerable.
Listen to the full episode: It’s well worth it for anyone with a stake in how medical transport gets handled: https://ajhcs.org/podcasts/why-medical-transportation-is-healthcares-next-strategic-frontier.