Efficient Routing for Patients in Rural Areas

Background

An NEMT provider is responsible for transporting patients from several rural areas to a treatment center in the city, where many patients receive dialysis, chemotherapy, or other recurring treatments. Due to the rural setting, the provider must navigate long distances, unpredictable traffic or road conditions while ensuring timely arrivals.

Problem Statements

The NEMT provider struggles with

Long Distance Routing: Rural areas often have fewer available routes to city centers, and the provider must find the fastest, safest, and most reliable route.
Fuel Efficiency and Cost: Long trips require optimal routes to minimize fuel consumption, reducing overall costs for the NEMT provider.

Solution

A Directions API is a crucial tool to overcome these challenges by generating optimal routes, accounting for real-time traffic conditions, and ensuring patients arrive on time for their treatments. It provides turn-by-turn navigation, taking into account road closures, and specific routing preferences. Here’s how the NEMT provider can use it to overcome above challenges:

Generate optimal routes from rural areas

Once an origin and destination is specified, the Directions API calculates the best route from rural pickup points to the treatment center in the city. It provides accurate, real-time routes that account for the limited road network in rural areas. waypoints can also be added in case there are more than one patients that need to be picked up.

Fuel efficiency and cost

The Directions API considers real-time traffic and historical traffic to compute the best routes such that unnecessary detours and delays due to traffic congestion are avoided. Consequently, efficient routing helps the provider minimize fuel consumption and operational costs.

Sample API request and solution

Here is complete sample JSON request with multiple pickups from rural areas and up to a treatment center within the city./

API Request

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curl --location '[https://api.nextbillion.io/directions/json?origin=34.27402378,-118.75661950&destination=34.04856863,-118.21162839&mode=car&key=](https://api.nextbillion.io/directions/json?origin=34.27402378,-118.75661950&destination=34.04856863,-118.21162839&mode=car&key=)<your_api_key>&waypoints=34.28010253,-118.72586502|34.26880494,-118.58425739|34.24647406,-118.55293047|34.24523793,-118.48762087'

API Response

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{
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    "status": "Ok",  
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    "routes": "[..]"
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}

Directions API helps NEMT providers to scale operations to all types of neighborhoods while ensuring flexibility and on-time performance without compromising on customer satisfaction, safety and operational efficiency.