National Academies Press: OpenBook

Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation (2011)

Chapter: Chapter 5 - Types of Transportation Services to Recognize

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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 5 - Types of Transportation Services to Recognize." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14490.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 5 - Types of Transportation Services to Recognize." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14490.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 5 - Types of Transportation Services to Recognize." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14490.
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14 Four Categories Describe Transportation Services To be able to compare the costs of various transportation services, different kinds of trans- portation services must be recognized. Human service transportation now is delivered in four distinct ways, which can be called “types” or “modes” of transportation services: • Community transportation. • Case management transportation. • Travel services for individuals. • Managed care transportation. Examples of the services that would be included under each type or mode of human services transportation are described in this chapter. Community Transportation This category includes the following functions and their related costs: • Trips provided for members of the general public or clients of human service agencies who could travel on a group basis (even if they are the only traveler on the vehicle at the moment). • Trips provided by paid staff and volunteers who have been trained to provide transportation services. • Efforts associated with eligibility determination, scheduling, arranging, or billing for trans- portation. • The purchase of specific individual transportation services from existing public or private transportation providers via contract or other arrangements. • The purchase of bus tokens, passes, or tickets for distribution to riders. • Personal care by attendants or interpreters who accompany eligible riders while traveling in community transportation mode. • Payments made to riders to help defray the costs of their travel using community transportation services. • Other activities and expenses if authorized and applicable. For example, Medicaid sometimes reimburses expenses for long-distance intercity bus and commercial air fares and lodging and subsistence expenses when these expenses are required to obtain out-of-town medical care. Expenses like these are not common for other programs. For the purposes of this project, air fares and overnight lodging and subsistence expenses are not included in the long-distance travel expenses commonly considered as community transportation expenses. Case Management Transportation This category includes transportation in which agency staff transport individuals and provide other services during the time at which the individual or group is being transported. Trips are C H A P T E R 5 Types of Transportation Services to Recognize

Types of Transportation Services to Recognize 15 typically provided in agency-owned vehicles or staff-owned vehicles. This category is distin- guished from directly operated community transportation, in which the staff member providing case management transportation may perform specifically planned case management or thera- peutic functions while providing the transportation services. Generally the person providing the transportation would be a social worker or case worker whose primary role is not that of provid- ing client transportation but of providing case management or therapeutic functions. This type of transportation includes the following: • Transportation of clients in staff-owned vehicles. • Transportation of clients in agency-owned vehicles that are not specifically dedicated to community transportation. • Lodging, meals, and parking expenses associated with case management transportation, as well as other expenses if authorized and applicable. Note that if case management services are not being performed during the trip, it may be more cost effective for the human services agency to have the client transported by a community trans- portation service and to use the case manager’s or social worker’s time for services that require their professional training. Travel Services for Individuals This category includes the following: • Transportation services designed to be offered to one individual at a time (although careful analysis might show that community transportation could be a more cost-effective option in a number of cases). • Any direct payment to an individual client to subsidize his or her use of a private automobile to facilitate program-related purposes, including – Gasoline subsidies paid directly to the client, family member, friend, or volunteer; – Car maintenance or repair expenses; – Cost of vehicle modifications to incorporate adaptive technologies; – Purchase of vehicle liability insurance on behalf of clients; and – Financial stipends to support an individual’s ongoing transportation needs (e.g., pay- ments for employment and employment-related transportation for a specific amount of time). • Mileage reimbursements or other fixed-rate reimbursements paid directly to clients. • Mileage reimbursements paid to family, friends, or volunteers for providing transportation to eligible clients. • Car rental expenses. • Costs associated with personal care attendants or interpreters who accompany the eligible client while traveling in specific individual transportation mode. • Lodging, meals, and parking expenses associated with specific individual transportation. • Other expenses if authorized and applicable. Managed Care Transportation This category includes transportation provided as part of an overall client health care plan (either a short-term or long-term care plan), under which the provider agency is obligated to provide client transportation. Transportation expenses often are part of a fixed payment or “cap- itated payment” made to the service provider by the funding source. Examples of this type of transportation include the following: • Direct operation of provider-owned vehicles to provide transportation services to individual clients. • Purchase of transportation from public or private transportation service providers.

16 Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation • Lodging, meals, and parking expenses associated with managed care transportation. • Other expenses if authorized and applicable. The Four Service Types Explain Typical Service Variations The four-part classification of service types reflects several key considerations: 1. Community transportation should be segregated from other types of human service agency transportation (i.e., individual, staff, and managed care). Community transportation services (provided by paid staff or volunteers) focus on groups of persons. They are those services that are most readily coordinated with programs funded by various federal agencies, including the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Health and Human Services. In addition, the iden- tification of expenditures and units of service provided in this type of service can assist com- munities in preparing the locally developed coordination plans now required by a number of U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) programs. 2. This classification fits existing program formats and protocols used in client transportation and would not require restructuring of state or local reporting procedures to implement it. 3. This four-part classification permits required service and cost data to be reported by service type, which is beneficial because one would expect real differences in measures such as cost per trip for each of the four types or modes of transportation services. Having made these distinctions regarding types of transportation services, it is important to note that the community transportation mode typically provides the majority of human service trips. While the community transportation mode often provides trips at a lower cost per trip than the other types of transportation, the travel services for the individual mode may be more cost effec- tive under certain special circumstances (e.g., in very low density communities, for trips involving multiple destinations, or other instances). In a number of instances, transportation provided by case managers or for specific individuals might be eligible for shifting to another mode unless sig- nificant case management activities are occurring during the trip itself or other special considera- tions are paramount. While managed care providers should be able to purchase transportation for their clients as easily as human service agencies can purchase such services, managed care providers have not embraced coordinated transportation services in some communities. Managed care trans- portation probably should be considered as one of the later efforts in the coordination process. RECOMMENDATIONS Focus first on the process of integrating data collection and reporting procedures for the community transportation mode. Next proceed to the case management mode. Include the other transportation modes into integrated data collection and report- ing procedures after you succeed at integrating the community transportation and case management transportation services into unified data collection and reporting practice. Integrating these procedures is a process that can take a number of years. Once efforts for community transportation operations are well under way, attention then can turn to the other types of transportation services, including specific individual transportation and managed care transportation.

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TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 144: Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation, Volume 1: The Transportation Services Cost Sharing Toolkit and Volume 2: Research Report explore issues and potential solutions for identifying and sharing the cost of providing transportation services for access to community-based human services programs. Collectively, the two volumes examine current practices and offer strategies for collecting necessary data, addressing administrative and policy-related issues, and establishing cost allocation procedures.

Volume 1: The Transportation Services Cost Sharing Toolkit leads the user through the process of setting up the necessary cost accounting system, identifying the data requirements and the measurement parameters, and describing procedures for applying the model. This volume concludes with instructions for using the actual Cost Sharing Model.

Volume 2: The Research Report summarizes all of the study components that contributed to formation of the Toolkit. It includes an extended evaluation of current experience and describes the regulatory environment that frames transportation service delivery requirements.

An executive summary of the report is included with the printed report.

The report includes the Cost Sharing Model along with instructions for setup and application on a CD-ROM, which is packaged with the reports.

The CD-ROM is also available for download from TRB’s website as an ISO image. Links to the ISO image and instructions for burning a CD-ROM from an ISO image are provided below.

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