Call the Car partners with Lyft Healthcare to decrease no-shows and increase completion rates
INDUSTRY | HEALTHCARE
Challenge
Call the Car, a healthcare transportation company, wanted to meet growing demand for rideshare services and member needs, while decreasing no-show rates and increasing completion rates.
Solution
Using Lyft’s Availability Forecast, flexible rides, and Lyft Assisted, Call the Car was able to optimize operations and put their members first.
Impact
- Higher completion rates and a drop in lapsed rides from 1% to 0.2%
- Decrease in no-shows from 13% to 8%
- Decrease in missed ride rates to 0.02% in Los Angeles
Through a collaborative partnership, Call the Car and Lyft Healthcare developed innovative rideshare features and established best-in-class member experiences.
When founder and CEO Dr. Michelle A. Tyson, M.D., started Call the Car in 2010, her goal was to create a transportation company that ensured that the most vulnerable communities in California received the care they deserved. She believed that transportation should be more than pick up and drop off, it should be an avenue to empower members, caregivers, and health plans to achieve better outcomes.
Over a decade later, those values are still present in operations today. The certified woman-and-minority-owned business headquartered in Diamond Bar has expanded to provide reliable Non-Medical Transportation (NMT) and a member-first experience to 5.5 million residents in all 58 counties in California.
“We’re very member-centric and big on quality,” said Michael Fell, COO. “With transportation, a lot of people think you’re a broker, a transportation provider, or a software company. But Call the Car believes you have to be all three things to achieve the outcomes that clients and members expect.
“The member always comes first,” continued Fell, “and everything that we do from how we answer the phones to the way that our vendors pick up the members, we make sure that it’s focused and tailored to members’ needs.”
Call the Car employees come with different experiences, from health plans to transportation organizations. While recognizing the challenges within each industry, the caring and compassionate team knows it is important to remain focused on their mission-based operation of improving healthcare outcomes for every single person, with every single ride.
“The key to success with any business is relationships. And Lyft has really been there for us. To troubleshoot, be a think tank, and really figure out how we make this partnership a success.”
— Michael Fell
COO at Call the Car
The challenge
Call the Car initially built their fleet to service dialysis patients. They’ve since expanded to serve those in need of life-sustaining treatments like chemo, radiation, and Methadone, as well as to get members to preventative care doctor appointments.
“We knew we had to partner with a rideshare company,” said Fell. “But there were struggles with capacity. When we first started using rideshare, we had two cell phones that we’d pass around the office for people to request rides. And once a ride ended, we requested another one right away, because you could only do one ride at a time.”
At around the same time, an All Plan Letter (APL) was released that required an NMT benefit be provided by all plans in California. This enhanced the benefit at large and required all plans in California to provide NMT and added a curb-to-curb benefit for ambulatory members.
“Some health plans already allowed an NMT benefit, but after that APL was released, all health plans had to provide this NMT transportation benefit. This included services for ambulatory members which were not required at the time,” said Michael Lujano, Director of Transportation. “That opened up a huge trip volume. We had already established a relationship with Lyft, and we were in a really good place. We felt comfortable with delivering the service through rideshare; it aligned perfectly.
“We were looking at it from a compassion and service delivery standpoint, making sure that any gap in the healthcare model was filled with a Call the Car service,” continued Lujano. “We started to see dramatic growth in rideshare trips and used our vehicles to fill the gaps. Even one member missing their dialysis appointment could mean that that person is going to end up in a hospital, which we want to avoid at all costs.”
Operational efficiency, reliable transportation, driver availability, and customer care would become vital to their success in the coming years.
The opportunity
The first step in optimizing operations was integrating Lyft Concierge into their workflow. Call the Car was able to request courtesy rides to their members—no cell phone (or two) needed.
As their business grew and ride requests continued to increase, Call the Car didn’t stop there. They implemented Lyft Assisted, a door-to-door ride mode, to give members a little extra assistance getting from their pickup location to the car, and from the car to their destination. They also adopted flexible rides to empower members to take control and request their own ride. And they incorporated Lyft’s Availability Forecast to efficiently manage their network and help ensure all riders were matched with drivers.
Even with a suite of features to maximize productivity and customer care, Call the Car knew they could do more to improve the member experience and health outcomes for all. So, they partnered more closely with Lyft to monitor data, suggest product enhancements, and invest in internal resources. During biweekly group meetings, the two teams tackled missed rider/driver connections and no-shows with incredible success.
The solution
Driver reliability
Call the Car facilitates tens of thousands of rides a week for members. They expect to complete over 5 million rides this year.
“We’ve seen a lot of challenges, and we partnered with Lyft to share our expertise,” said Lujano. “[We wanted to know] where we have availability and where we can successfully connect drivers with our riders.
“During a brainstorming session, we suggested adding a ride reliability factor,” continued Lujano. “We thought that we might be able to increase overall volume and expand the rideshare offering to members that typically wouldn’t have access.”
That collaboration led to the creation and implementation of Lyft’s Availability Forecast, which has resulted in a 99.9% driver match rate in some areas.
Call the Car uses Lyft’s Availability Forecast through their API connection to determine rideshare reliability for rides scheduled in advance. Query results are returned as red, yellow, or green, signaling to dispatchers where to avoid and where they can confidently schedule rides. If a query returns green, those ride requests are allowed to pass through. If it returns red or yellow, dispatchers remove the ride request and use alternative providers. Call the Car is excited to further automate the process and improve their workflow by removing any results that are not green from dispatchers’ view.
“Now that we can see reliability based on historical data by date, time of day, and geographic area, we feel confident assigning trips,” said Lujano. “The data doesn’t lie. It’s been very successful in areas where we had typically blacked out [rideshare as an option], and we’ve seen a tremendous decrease in the number of lapsed rides [where the Lyft platform couldn’t connect with a driver].”
Flexible rides
Call the Car also helped build flexible rides, a feature in Concierge that lets riders request rides when they’re ready to go. This makes pickups smoother, return trips easier to arrange, and scheduling rides more efficient. Lyft and Call the Car met weekly to develop and test flexible rides, and Call the Car provided feedback on everything from message sequencing to verbiage.
“For all major feature launches, Call the Car has been an early adopter,” said Eliana Carni, Manager for Healthcare Platforms at Lyft. “They’ve been true thought partners, helping us to iterate and learn. We regularly include them in product feedback sessions. They make sure that we keep the voice of our partner in mind and have been invaluable to the success of our product at large.”
Transitioning riders to flexible rides has contributed to a reduction in no-shows and empowered members to take an active role in arranging transportation and managing their health. “When members know that they can get a ride within 15 minutes,” added Lujano, “they spend more time with their doctors understanding their health. Now they don’t have to feel rushed.”
No-show reduction
Through a collaborative partnership, Call the Car and Lyft have reduced no-shows (defined as a member not connecting with a driver) to 8%, among the very best in their peer group.
No-shows can have far-reaching impacts. “They’re expensive and cause disruptions for us, health plans, and members,” said Lujano. “We want to connect every member with the first ride that comes out to them, because that’s what’s most efficient. Every time there’s another ride, it’s more working hours, and even if it may be a few seconds, it adds up. When you’re talking tens of thousands of trips a day going to rideshare, if one goes wrong, it [can add up to] hours of recovery for those missed rides.”
With no-show data from Lyft, Call the Car was able to focus on innovating and serving their members. Call the Car has automated workflows, mined performance data to optimally match riders and drivers, as well as deployed customer service representatives to onboard, educate, and live monitor certain trips.
Together, Lyft and Call the Car have cracked the NMT code—evidenced by the rapid implementation of Lyft’s Availability Forecast, flexible rides, and Lyft Assisted.
TOP BENEFITS INCLUDE
Planning ahead
With Lyft’s Availability Forecast, Call the Car was able to predict when the Lyft network would be a reliable way to get members where they need to go, when they need to get there. Call the Car knew ahead of time when a scheduled ride should match with a driver, giving them the opportunity to choose alternate transportation if needed. They also found that Lyft can service more rides than they thought possible, like certain rides in remote areas.
“We’ve seen good returns. We’re using the API to determine if there is a high reliability, and then [compare the] response [to our] thresholds to know when to assign rideshare.” —Michael Lujano
Empowering members
With flexible rides, pickups are smooth and result in a reduction in rider no-shows and cancellations. Additionally, flexible rides are especially easy for riders who need roundtrip transportation. Riders have a link that lets them easily request a return ride when they’re ready.
“[Flexible rides] allows members to have a level of independence that they didn’t have before. [It] also helps to boost their overall health, because being able to feel confident that they can manage their own conditions really contributes to a healthy well-being.” —Michael Lujano
Customizing levels of service
With Lyft Assisted rides, the driver parks, meets the member at the front door of the home or facility, and walks with them back to the car, offering a helping hand during pickup and dropoff. This extra level of service and additional connection point not only help to decrease no-show rates and boost member satisfaction, they also can free up more-specialized transportation options (e.g., wheelchair vehicles) to help non-ambulatory members.
“Historically [members who want assistance] had to be transported by a specialty vehicle and a specialty driver. It was just how the industry worked. By introducing Lyft Assisted, we were able to remove some of those trips that would go to a wheelchair vehicle and free up the capacity of permitted vehicles to specialize in wheelchair services. I feel like we’re offering a new service to this population that can change their ability to access healthcare services.” —Michael Lujano
Looking ahead
Call the Car is currently using flexible rides for members that have a scheduled appointment, but they hope to expand the feature in the near future. Their forthcoming flexible rides pilot utilizes internal systems where an algorithm looks at an appointment time and provides a recommended pickup time.
“We’re finding that more people are using flexible rides and getting more comfortable with it. There’s no reason why we can’t do it on both legs of the trip,” said Fell. “Our goal is to [transition] all curb-to-curb and door-to-door rideshare trips to flexible rides and put everything in the members’ hands. So when they’re ready, they can call and know with a 99% degree of confidence that once they click that link, a driver will be connected with them within 5 minutes.”
Not only will this new procedure help to reduce no-shows, it will empower members to take control.
“And that right there is industry-changing,” concluded Lujano. “It’s not being done right now, [and] it’s something that could improve service as dramatically as when we released flexible rides. It’s going to be a big change.”
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