Rural healthcare transformation requires more than funding. It demands infrastructure, data, and collaboration that holds up in the real world. That's why Kinetik's designation as an official partner of the Microsoft Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Collaborative represents a meaningful step in our work to make healthcare access a reality for rural Americans. The Collaborative unites technology companies, healthcare providers, payers, and nonprofits to support states applying for funding through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion-plus federal initiative designed to expand access, improve outcomes, and build lasting healthcare capacity across rural communities.
Transportation is not an administrative afterthought. It is a clinical asset. When a member can't get to their appointment, preventive care doesn't happen, chronic disease goes unmanaged, and costly emergency visits follow. Yet the legacy non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) broker model was never built to solve this. Opaque pricing, manual workflows, ghost rides billed at scale, and zero real-time visibility have made transportation one of the most mismanaged benefits in Medicaid and Medicare. The opportunity isn't just to fix what's broken. It's to build something that makes transportation a genuinely reliable, measurable, and strategic part of how health plans deliver care.
That's the problem Kinetik was built to solve. Our platform manages the complete NEMT benefit lifecycle in a single closed-loop infrastructure, connecting health plans, members, and providers in real time with the auditability and payment integrity the legacy broker model was never designed to deliver. FWA protections eliminate ghost rides before they become claims. GPS-verified trip completion triggers automated clean claim generation. 24-hour provider payments through Kinetik Financial Services make us the preferred partner for high-quality transportation providers, which translates directly into stronger network depth for health plans. The results speak for themselves: more than $1.1 billion in NEMT claims processed, 5.1 million trips managed, a 97% trip digitization rate, and a 40% reduction in cost-per-trip.
We look forward to building alongside the organizations in this Collaborative to help states design and execute rural health transformation programs that are technically sound, financially sustainable, and built around the real-world needs of the communities they serve.
