About this episode
Brandon Tenney, director of customer relations at Patient Transport in Arizona, runs about 50 vehicles a day for more than 100 facilities, roughly 35 in Mesa and the rest in Tucson. Because skilled nursing facilities pay directly out of their own bottom line, prices stay low, so Tenney trains unit coordinators on Bambi's facility portal to pull ride requests out of a call center staffed by about 10 call takers and five dispatchers. Government work through Valley Metro fills schedule gaps, private pay doubled this past year, and the contracts on the table would take the fleet from 50 to 100 vans.
Key takeaways
- Patient Transport contracts directly with skilled nursing facilities instead of brokers, which forces pricing down because the fee comes straight out of each facility's own bottom line.
- Tenney builds facility-specific slide decks on the ordering portal, then asks coordinators when they last ordered pizza by phone. Trained coordinators stop calling, which cuts call taker labor.
- One unit coordinator phoning in 20 appointment rides takes a call taker offline for 30 minutes. Entering the same batch in the portal lets her work it between other tasks.
- Flex shifts posted in the HR software let drivers claim open five hour blocks when ASAP brokerage trips spike, instead of dispatch mass-texting the roster and tripping overtime.
- Broda chairs cover patients who cannot sit upright in a wheelchair. Doctors' offices let crews leave them, unlike stretchers, where wait and return can strand a driver three hours.
Chapters
- 0:02 Everyone here sounds like an owner
- 1:20 Joining Patient Transport in 2020 and the customer relations role
- 3:13 Selling skilled nursing facilities on the ordering portal
- 5:51 Direct facility contracts instead of broker work
- 7:09 Call volume is a labor problem
- 12:06 What a 50 vehicle operation looks like day to day
- 13:10 Adding government work through Valley Metro
- 15:09 Private pay doubles, and where those leads come from
- 16:51 Hiring a CFO and running structured leadership meetings
- 19:39 Flex shifts for unpredictable ASAP trips
- 24:23 The contracts that would take the fleet from 50 to 100
- 30:20 Why Broda chairs beat stretcher appointments
