Ride YourWay Scaled 350% in Two Years with RouteGenie Software
In 2019, Ride YourWay was stuck at 300 trips per year with a single vehicle and an Apple calendar. Seven years later, they're managing 1 million miles across 36 vehicles, and they're the only NEMTAC-accredited NEMT provider in Michigan. The turning point? RouteGenie’s data they could finally trust.
The Origins
Ride YourWay, an NEMT provider based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is not your typical garage startup; it was born in a hospital bed.
Back in 2013, I was diagnosed and treated for a rare type of brain cancer. Between being a patient and my later career as a bedside nurse, I saw that transportation was a huge issue.
This difficult personal experience encouraged Tom to set out on a mission to fix the broken connection between patients and their vital appointments.
Unfortunately, having a mission and scaling a business are two different things.
The Challenges: Limited Growth and Missing Analytical Insights
The Volume Trap
Ride YourWay was launched with a single vehicle. In 2018, the company did 300 trips. In 2019? One vehicle, more effort, still 300 trips. In 2020, they attempted a pivot towards transporting COVID specimens; however, despite an increased workload, the enterprise was not growing fast enough or moving towards the initially set goal of providing an efficient, passenger-centric transportation experience.
Volume over quality was never an acceptable outcome.
Operating in the Dark
The sheer will to evolve within the change-resistant NEMT industry was not enough. Tom remembers, “I was scheduling all of our trips with just an Apple calendar. That's when we were doing like two or three rides a day.” These routing and scheduling approaches were not scalable. Lacking the ability to aggregate and analyze data, the Ride YourWay team was operating blindly, and major business decisions had to be based on the manually collected information without deep insights into the numbers.
Moreover, this unreliable data could not be presented to potential clients. Therefore, significant progress in service improvement stalled while competitors secured contracts with slicker presentations (yet rarely better service).
Most companies in this industry focused on volume, not quality. But we saw firsthand what happens when transportation fails patients. We knew we had to and could be different, but we just needed the tools to prove it.
The NEMT industry is notoriously resistant to change. Ride YourWay needed a partner who valued data as much as they did.
The Solution: RouteGenie Analytics and the Efficiency Leap
In their pursuit of efficiency and scalability, Ride YourWay turned to RouteGenie, a comprehensive NEMT software solution designed to optimize operations through data analytics and automation.
RouteGenie’s data-centric approach provided Ride YourWay with essential insights into its operations, enabling it to improve efficiency and grow its fleet. As recalled by Karas Bayko (Director of Operations at Ride YourWay): "We started with 8 vehicles when we moved to RouteGenie; now we’re at 36, and we only need 4 dispatchers to coordinate the entire fleet”.
Ride YourWay’s use of a custom dashboard to present clients with KPIs, cost savings, and growth opportunities established their credibility as a reliable partner in the NEMT industry.
The data transparency enabled them to tailor their services to the specific needs of healthcare providers, optimizing both scheduling and dispatch processes. Zachary Meadows (Ride YourWay Director of Finance & Data Analytics) points out that "Data transparency is key. We track metrics like on-time performance and discharge times to provide hospitals with insights they wouldn’t otherwise have."
Scalability was a major feature Ride YourWay was looking for. As Zachary highlighted, "RouteGenie works just as well for an eight-vehicle fleet as it does for a larger fleet. It has no real barriers to scaling. By leveraging data, we can refine our operations, determining when to add vehicles, which vehicles to add, and how to schedule shifts for maximum efficiency.”
Fleet optimization was also a critical area of improvement. Tom attributes the progress in this area to specific software features: "Our heat maps help us determine the busiest times of the day, allowing us to adjust fleet capacity accordingly and ensure the highest efficiency for both our clients and us." Features like deadhead settings improved trip assignments, reducing inefficiencies caused by drivers being too far from pickup points.
The software has played a huge role in allowing us to scale while maintaining quality.
Finally, Zachary mentioned that the onboarding process is easy, and the RouteGenie Driver App itself is very “driver-friendly,” simplifying their work and improving customer service quality. Furthermore, automation tools such as self-dispatching enabled them to perform effective operations even during off-hours.
Priceless Benefit: Seamless Cooperation with Medical Facility Partners
In all major markets, hospitals have post-care responsibilities once the patient leaves the medical facility. If this person ends up back in the emergency room, the hospital is essentially picking up that care for free. Therefore, making sure that the patient is safely transported home and makes it to the follow-up appointment is crucial for any healthcare system.
Tom observes, “There is so much time that we are spending in a vehicle with a person that we are almost becoming a part of the patient care team. Let’s take dialysis; according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), every missed appointment increases the risk of hospitalization by 40 percent. Therefore, if transportation fails, the patient misses an appointment and is later admitted to the ER, the healthcare facility incurs exponentially higher costs.”
Moreover, without proper data-driven optimization, processing times for NEMT riders range from 4 to 8 hours. This lag between the transportation request and the actual driver pulling up to the pickup location cascades into multiple problems: increased hospital bed time (costing facilities thousands per day), missed appointments (affecting passengers’ health outcomes and reimbursement), poor financial outcomes for all parties involved, member dissatisfaction that health plans couldn't ignore.
When Ride YourWay initially signed up with RouteGenie, they were looking for a tool with vast data analytics capabilities that would enable them to scale. However, eventually, they also discovered that RouteGenie helped them to positively influence the bottom line of their healthcare facility partners.
Today, to ensure reliable and high-value medical transportation service, we coordinate scheduling with our medical facility partners via the RouteGenie Facility Portal. This allowed us to speed up discharge times from 4–8 hours to essentially on demand, drastically enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction of the entire healthcare system.
The Results: Evolution Towards a Value-Based Business Model
The integration of RouteGenie has yielded substantial improvements for Ride YourWay:
- With the help of RouteGenie, Ride YourWay has become the only NEMT provider in Michigan to hold NEMTAC accreditation. "Being NEMTAC accredited was transformative for us. We built our policies and procedures based on industry standards and then elevated from there." – Tom Sikkema.
Note
The Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Accreditation Commission (NEMTAC) is a leading national accreditation body for NEMT providers. Accreditation requires documented compliance across numerous operational areas and demonstrates a provider’s commitment to elevated service beyond basic state regulatory minimums.
- Tom insists, "The API integration with major brokers has been huge, allowing us to seamlessly integrate trip data and timestamps, helping us scale."
- “The company scaled from 8 vehicles in 2022 to 24 in 2024, and 36 in 2026, with RouteGenie managing approximately 80-90% of the 1 million miles driven.” – Tom.
- "The efficiencies RouteGenie creates don’t just improve operations; they allow us to reinvest in quality, giving our customers a better experience at a competitive price." – Brady Boothe, Operations Manager at Ride YourWay.
- The company managed to free up resources to collect information about each rider and provide a personalized riding experience, which would lead to higher customer satisfaction and support their value-based business model.
- Enhanced data transparency enabled Ride YourWay to showcase significant time and cost savings to hospital partners, including reduced bed wait times.
RouteGenie’s commitment to continuous innovation and a customer-driven approach means that providers like Ride YourWay help shape the platform's evolution.
The medical transportation industry is outdated and resistant to change. We’re always looking to improve, and I appreciate that RouteGenie shares that mindset.
Conclusion
Ride YourWay’s journey demonstrates the transformative power of embracing data-driven technology within the NEMT industry. Through RouteGenie analytics and optimization tools, Ride YourWay successfully balanced growth with quality, proving that operational efficiency and patient-centered service can coexist in the often rigid NEMT landscape.
Book a RouteGenie demo to see how:
- API integrations eliminate manual data entry and errors
- Fleet optimization tools help you scale without waste
- Facility portals and clear data prove your value to healthcare partners
- Compliance tracking simplifies accreditation and regulatory requirements
- Passenger Experience module to enhance your efforts in customer feedback collection and retention
Ready To Join 600+ Fleets Already Transforming Their Operations?
Schedule a personalized demo today and discover how we can optimize your fleet, improve patient satisfaction, and boost your bottom line.
Schedule a Demo