Rural/Metro works closely with hospitals, insurance providers, long-term care facilities, healthcare networks and managed care organizations to determine how best to serve clients in need of non-emergency medical transportation. Our focus is on ensuring that the patient receives high-quality treatment while still controlling costs.

By providing a variety of transportation options, Rural/Metro can add value to the operations of HMOs, hospitals and other managed care providers as a "gatekeeper" of ambulance services. We offer a full range of services to ensure patients receive the most appropriate assistance and care, regardless of the nature of their transport.

We use our proven management systems and nationwide resources to ensure cost-efficient services, keeping the cost to customers and to our healthcare providers down.

What We Do
Medical transportation is becoming increasingly complex, and to be cost-effective requires offering a host of options that represent different degrees of medical attention and sophistication. Rural/Metro offers a wide variety of general medical transportation services.

Many patients -- particularly long-term care patients -- require medical transportation on a regular basis for non-emergency situations ... such as visits to a medical facility for dialysis, chemotherapy or other regular medical treatments.

While many of these transports do require some degree of medical care, the vast majority do not require the extensive -- and costly -- skills and equipment of a fully staffed paramedic ambulance. Rural/Metro offers an appropriate level of care to every transportation situation.

The full spectrum of choices we provide range from mobile intensive care units staffed by nurses or physician assistants to basic life support units. This enables us to provide all patients with an appropriate level of medical transportation to meet their specific needs. This diversity of cost-effective alternatives in medical transportation is particularly important to the growing managed care marketplace.

Keys To Doing It Well
In addition to offering a variety of transportation options, Rural/Metro also focuses on building statewide, multi-state and regional medical networks to serve our managed care clients. The nation's health care and managed care facilities have been forming statewide and regional alliances that want one ambulance provider to serve their entire geographical base.

Through these networks, managed care organizations and other health care providers can call a single number to schedule any type of medical transportation they need ... and anywhere they need it, whether it requires an ambulance, critical care transport vehicle or air ambulance. All calls are routed to one central dispatch center, where dispatchers determine the appropriate level of transport and then schedule the transport. Managed care customers get one bill, from one company, so their claims processing is easier and faster.

Through these types of programs, Rural/Metro is strategically positioned to better serve our customers through greater accessibility, cost savings and choices for medical transportation.