Patient transport sits at the center of throughput, yet at many organizations it still works the way it did decades ago. Staff pick up the phone, call one provider after another, wait on hold and for callbacks, and chase down paperwork that often arrives incomplete. That friction lands on both sides of the transaction, the facilities that order transport and the ambulance services that provide it. Ryde Central automates the process for both, replacing those manual phone calls with a single centralized workflow.
For hospital systems and health facilities
For hospital systems, the problem usually starts with too many phones and disconnected systems. At the University of Maryland Medical System, years of acquisitions had left transport coordination looking like a patchwork quilt, with a 30 percent on-time rate and Case Management time lost to chasing rides. After the move to Ryde Central, the difference was immediate. As Deb Youngquist of the University of Maryland Medical System put it, “Ryde Central has cut down the amount of time to order patient transport from 45 minutes to a click of a button.”
Bayhealth, central and southern Delaware’s largest healthcare system, faced the same bottleneck. Social workers and care managers picked up the phone to arrange every transport, and roughly 90 percent of transport forms arrived incomplete before a trip could proceed. Ryde Central replaced that with a point-and-click workflow, completed physician certification statement forms at booking, and routed trips through a tiered vendor structure that tracks response and acceptance rates by provider. As Stacy Manning, Director of Patient Flow and Capacity at Bayhealth, described it, “We were still stuck in the stone age of telephone. Moving to that technology-driven solution has really made it effective for us operationally.”
For ambulance services and transport providers
The same platform solves the mirror-image problem for the companies that provide transport. Hospital to Home, a medical transportation company operating across Virginia, was scaling a statewide EMS operation that put real pressure on throughput at every level: more volume, more partners, and more places for things to go wrong. Ryde Central replaced the constant calls and callbacks with point-and-click intake, surfaced documentation gaps at booking so medical necessity was met before a transport left the facility, and kept partners like Riverside Health System informed in real time. As Chris Stanton, Director of Communications at Hospital to Home, explained, “It cuts down on the phone calls, and that helps us out a lot. Everything is point and click, kind of set it and forget it. Just being all in one place and having the automatic integration is extremely helpful.”
For Physicians Ambulance, growing across 22 Ohio counties meant rising call volume, a higher risk of booking the wrong service level, and reimbursement denials when documentation did not capture medical necessity. By centralizing intake, automating service-level determination through a logic-based questionnaire, and streamlining documentation, the company cut its reimbursement denial rate from 22 percent to 13 percent in just over a year and freed its team to take on more volume. As President Jason Hess put it, “Ryde Central didn’t just solve today’s problems, it scaled with us. Whether we’re managing a surge or short-staffed, our team can handle more than ever before.”
LIFEwest Ambulance Service made a similar choice as it grew across California and deepened its partnership with six Providence Health facilities. Rather than stitch together standalone systems, it chose Ryde Central to eliminate fragmented workflows, introduce logic-based transport decisions, and remove the telephone game between facilities, once saving nearly 40 minutes of coordination time on a single complex transfer. As Founder and CEO Sean Sullivan explained, “It has been a game changer in anchoring the value of our service as it relates to the delivery of care within our hospitals and health systems. Now there is objective information, and customers have a full picture of service delivery.”
One platform, both sides of the transport
Across hospital systems and transport providers alike, the pattern is consistent. Ryde Central replaces phone calls and informal relationships with a centralized workflow, captures documentation at the point of booking, applies logic-based rules to match the right service level, and gives every party real-time visibility into performance. That visibility reshapes vendor relationships, surfaces accountability that calls and paperwork never could, and keeps patients moving through the system faster.
What links these organizations is not a single fix but a single platform. Instead of stitching together phones, forms, and standalone tools, Ryde Central manages the full transport lifecycle in one place: intake and scheduling, tiered routing to the right provider, automated medical necessity checks, PCS and payor forms generated directly from EHR data, real-time tracking across SMS, email, and chat, and the reporting and invoicing that close the loop. Because it integrates with existing EHR and CAD systems and serves hospitals, NEMT providers, trip brokers, skilled nursing facilities, and public agencies alike, Ryde Central raises throughput on both sides of the transport at once. To see what that looks like for your operation, schedule a demo with Ryde Central.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Manual coordination typically means staff calling one provider after another, waiting on hold for callbacks, and chasing down paperwork that often arrives incomplete. This friction shows up on both sides of the transaction, hospitals and the transport providers they call, and it directly slows how quickly patients move through the system.
At one central and southern Delaware health system, roughly 90 percent of transport forms arrived incomplete before a trip could proceed when coordination was done entirely by phone. Missing documentation like this is a recurring cause of delayed transports and reimbursement denials industry-wide.
When documentation doesn’t clearly capture medical necessity, transport claims are more likely to be denied. One Ohio ambulance provider growing across 22 counties, for example, reduced its reimbursement denial rate from 22 percent to 13 percent in just over a year after centralizing intake and automating service-level determination.
At the University of Maryland Medical System, Ryde Central cut the time to order patient transport from 45 minutes to a single click, according to Deb Youngquist. The platform replaces the manual phone calls that previously stretched coordination time across multiple providers and callbacks with a centralized, point-and-click workflow.
Ryde Central manages intake and scheduling, tiered routing to the right provider, automated medical necessity checks, PCS and payor forms generated directly from EHR data, real-time tracking across SMS, email, and chat, and reporting and invoicing, all in one platform. It integrates with existing EHR and CAD systems and serves hospitals, NEMT providers, trip brokers, skilled nursing facilities, and public agencies.
