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Maintaining Compliance
November 22, 2023
You can find a partial list of compliance measures at the bottom of this article
Similar to other industries, the transportation industry has guidelines that must be followed. Failure to comply with federal and state guidelines can result in severe consequences for your business. For that reason, it’s important to fully understand the data required for your company to be considered compliant. Keep in mind that while there are some federal guidelines, generally, these guidelines vary state by state.
Should your company face a compliance audit, it is important to know exactly what will be expected of you. A compliance audit is a comprehensive review of an organization’s adherence to regulatory guidelines. You will be asked to provide data from past business activities such as what services you’ve billed for, names of drivers, and vehicle registrations. Failure to produce this information can come with negative repercussions, including fines or even prosecution.
Maintaining a compliant internal audit trail is essential. Knowing you have this trail in place will keep you and your employees from wasting time locating old, possibly error-ridden information.
Keeping records by hand requires your drivers to have hard copies of records in their vehicles. This can lead to records being destroyed or lost. Not to mention how easily drivers can forget about record keeping when they have a vehicle full of passengers to tend to. When we ask our staff to do both the driver and record keeper’s job, we set them up to be overwhelmed and make mistakes. These mistakes have the potential to lead your company to a failing audit.
Taking the initiative to switch from manual data entry to electronic record keeping via software solutions is easier than you think. Many software providers offer full implementation assistance, training, and support to make it easy to transition to a new software solution so that you can focus on what matters most: serving your customers.
Most software solutions will know what audit data is required for trips. Additionally, most software solutions allow your driver to view and capture this information easily. Many of these solutions include mobile applications that use geotagging and timestamping to create an audit trail of every action made during each trip. Geotagging and automatic timestamping directly from the vehicle provides the necessary data needed to prove compliance. Since this is usually done in the background automatically, it is less of a burden on your drivers than asking them to keep handwritten records in their vehicle.
For far too long, the transportation industry has resisted moving to electronic record keeping. While change can be difficult to adapt to, the use of electronic recordkeeping is quite frankly, essential. Manual processes, especially at a larger scale, create many opportunities for human error. Whether information is inaccurate, incomplete, or even missing, the manual reporting and reviewing process is a huge source of stress for your company. Should your company be audited, the auditor will need to have access to verified information from each trip. If you only have trip information in the form of paper records it will be challenging if not impossible, to get the auditor what is needed.
REQUIRED INFORMATION COULD INCLUDE ANY OR ALL OF THE FOLLOWING:
- The Medicaid enrollee’s name and Medicaid ID number
- The date that transportation services were provided
- The pickup and drop-off addresses
- The time you arrived for pickup
- The time you arrived at the drop-off location
- Vehicle license plate number of the vehicle used for transportation
- The driver’s license number of the driver that provided transportation services
- Printed full name and signature of the driver providing the transport
- An attestation from the driver that the trip was completed
- Proof the vehicle belongs to the correct entity and the identification number matches the ownership papers
- A signature from the client confirming that transportation services were provided
- Preauthorization of coverage before the beneficiary receives transportation
- A physician may need to authorize the need for beneficiary transportation
- May only want to know that the beneficiary’s location drop-off was to a medical appointment
- May expect the medical facility to phone in the medical transportation request before providing services
SOME STATES MAY HAVE QUALIFICATIONS FOR DRIVERS SUCH AS:
- A limited number of points on their license
- Certified driver health
- Vehicle liability insurance
- Criminal background check
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From the beginning, RoutingBox has remained committed to removing barriers for transportation companies attempting to provide access to healthcare and community services. Now, we want to help you.