How myPlace Health saves more than $1,200 per member, every month, with Bambi

The front door to the whole care model

Wirter Mangrum has spent twenty years moving people. He started in airport transfers, where a late van means a missed flight. For nearly three years he has run transportation for myPlace Health, a PACE program in Los Angeles, where a late van means a participant misses dialysis, a specialist visit, or a day at the center with people who know their name.

That is what outsiders miss about PACE transportation. It is not a shuttle. Every PACE participant is 55 or older, lives in the community, and is sick enough to qualify for nursing home care. Many live with several chronic conditions at once: diabetes, dementia, COPD, heart failure. If the ride does not happen, the clinic visit does not happen, the meal does not happen, and the whole point of PACE, keeping older adults healthy and at home, starts to slip.

The stakes are financial too. myPlace Health is a prepaid plan that takes full financial risk for its participants, paid a fixed amount each month by Medicare and Medi-Cal. Every dollar spent on a ride is a dollar that does not go to care. Transportation is one of the largest lines a PACE program can actually control.

A program built to grow fast

myPlace Health was launched by two nonprofit health plans, SCAN Group and Commonwealth Care Alliance, and opened its first PACE center near downtown Los Angeles in February 2024. SCAN Group took full ownership in 2025. A second center, a 33,000-square-foot building in Compton serving South Los Angeles, followed later that year.

By June 2026 the program had passed 300 participants across the two centers, which myPlace describes as one of the fastest growth rates per center of any PACE organization in California. Every one of those participants gets door-to-door rides to the center and to authorized medical appointments across Los Angeles County, at no cost, in vans equipped for walkers and wheelchairs.

From two contracted drivers to a fleet of their own

myPlace Health launched transportation in February 2024 the way many new programs do: a contracted vendor and two dedicated drivers. It worked until enrollment grew. The program brought transportation in-house to control drivers, vehicles and the participant experience, and inherited a new problem.

Dispatchers coordinated the week largely by spreadsheet and phone. More participants meant more trips, more same-day changes, more vehicles to track and more calls to make it all line up. Wirter calls it the breaking point: rising enrollment made manual coordination unsustainable.

• City routes. Los Angeles traffic complicates every pickup and drop-off.
• Last-minute changes. Appointments move, and participants feel unwell. Same-day changes are the norm.
• Two centers, many destinations. Appointments are spread across provider offices all over the county.
• Blind spots. Little insight into vehicle use, miles driven or driver performance.
• Paperwork. Every request passed through phone calls and spreadsheets before it reached a driver.

Third time's a charm

Bambi was not myPlace Health's first transportation software. It was the third. The first lacked the functionality the team needed. The second was too complicated for a dispatch desk that has to move fast when three participants change appointments before 8 a.m. Wirter's verdict on the third: easy to use, and it performs on every front.

Bambi sits alongside two other tools in the program's stack: dash cameras and telematics on one side, vehicle maintenance on the other. Bambi runs the part that touches participants every day: scheduling, dispatch and routing.

"In 1969, we landed on the moon with computing power weaker than a modern smartphone. Today, with more resources than ever, we're still struggling to solve problems that have existed for decades." Wirter Mangrum, Director of Transportation, myPlace Health

What changed day to day

Run Bambi Run plans the day in one click

Instead of building routes by hand, dispatchers load the day's trips and hit Run Bambi Run. It builds routes across the whole fleet, cuts unnecessary miles, fills seats more efficiently, and re-plans in seconds when a participant's appointment changes. The result: more trips without more staff or more vans.

Departments request rides directly

Clinic and center staff used to send transportation requests through spreadsheets, and every handoff was a chance for a delay or a mistake. Now departments submit requests through Bambi's Facility Portal. Dispatch accepts, schedules and routes them right away. No re-keying, no lost requests.

Everyone can see the ride

With Fleet HQ, live trip status is no longer something only dispatch can see. Transport staff, departments, clinicians and caregivers can all see where the van is. Fewer "where is the van?" calls, and more confidence from the families who depend on it.

The results

Transportation cost fell from about $2,000 to under $800 per member per month, a saving of more than $1,200 per participant every month. Cost per trip dropped from about $150 to $53. Trip volume grew while the program added no staff and no vehicles.

The operational wins matter as much as the dollars. Optimized scheduling and real-time monitoring cut wait times. Leadership can now make fleet, staffing and growth decisions with data instead of instinct. And for participants that means more reliable pickups, shorter rides and better communication, which the program says translates directly into better access to care and community.

Why it matters for every PACE program

Every PACE program has to provide transportation, and every one is paid a fixed amount per participant. That makes the ride one of the few large costs a program can actually manage down without touching clinical care. myPlace Health's numbers show how big that lever is: at more than $1,200 per participant per month, savings on a 300-participant census add up to millions of dollars a year that can go back into care. That figure is our arithmetic from the program's reported numbers, and it depends on census and trip volume.

The road ahead

Wirter is presenting the program's story to fellow PACE leaders at the 2026 National PACE Association Annual Conference in Denver in a session titled "Smarter Rides, Better Outcomes: How One PACE Program Transformed Its Transportation Operations." His message is the one his numbers make: when transportation works better, the whole PACE model works better.

Run your PACE transportation on Bambi

In-house fleet, contracted providers, or both. Scheduling, dispatch, routing and live tracking in one system, at $69 per active vehicle per month with no annual contracts. See how it works on our PACE programs page, or book a demo built around your own routes.