Rural health initiatives have seen a wave of new investment in recent years, from federal funding to expanded Medicaid commitments and state-level transformation programs. But investment alone doesn’t guarantee that members actually receive care. For millions of rural residents, the gap between a funded service and a kept appointment comes down to infrastructure — whether the systems connecting members, providers, health plans, and transportation are built to work together.
Non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) is where that gap becomes most visible. NEMT exists as a required Medicaid benefit precisely because transportation is a documented barrier to care, but in practice it operates outside the systems it’s meant to serve. Brokers manage trips through proprietary platforms that don’t connect to care management tools or electronic health records. Trip data is incomplete. No-shows go unverified. When the data chain breaks at the transportation layer, it creates blind spots across the system. Health plans and providers lose the ability to confirm whether care was actually accessed, or to understand why it wasn’t.
In this MedCity News article, Kinetik co-founder and CEO Sufian Chowdhury argues that this isn’t simply an operational inconvenience. For rural communities specifically, fragmentation in transportation infrastructure is a threat to the credibility of the broader health investment. If outcomes can’t be measured because patient arrival can’t be confirmed, no one can know whether a program is working.
Read how connected infrastructure can help rural health investments deliver measurable outcomes →
