Transportation gaps for poor, elderly identified

Getting poor or disabled people home from the hospital or into Hutchinson from out of town to access healthcare and mental health services were listed Wednesday as two primary gaps in regional public transportation service.

Solutions, however, were not so easily identifiable.

Just a handful of people showed up Wednesday afternoon for a Kansas Department of Transportation public meeting at the Reno County Area Transit office to offer input in on gaps in public transportation for the elderly, poor and disabled.

Hutchinson was the last stop in a series of such meetings around the state by KDOT and an Omaha consulting firm assisting in drafting a Coordinated Public Transit-Human Services Transportation Plan (CPT-HSTP), a requirement for federal public transportation dollars.

Besides Rcat officials and a pair of bus drivers, participants included Mike Garrett, CEO of Horizon’s Mental Health Center, Corey Griffith, safety officer at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, and Terry Bolte, director of the McPherson County Council on Aging.

“We serve a five-county area, with our home office is in Reno County,” Garrett advised Bill Troe, with SRF Consulting Group, who conducted the meeting. “We have people in the hospital who can’t get home to Medicine Lodge and Kingman. We have other consumers who need to get to our services. Within Reno County, we have a pretty good system.”

Besides transportation out of town, the biggest gap he sees, Griffith said, was transportation home from the hospital after 5 p.m.

“Discharge goes into the evening, past normal operating hours,” he said.

The drivers were not aware of any particular issues, other than riders wanting to get to other counties, particularly Sedgwick County and Wichita.

Part of the goal in developing the plan, Troe said, is identifying human service agencies providing for needs of elderly and disabled, and others that might provide transportation, such as hospital vans, group homes or adult daycare centers.

“To look for areas that overlap, where there might be an opportunity to get more mobility for the dollars they’re spending,” he said. “Can we arrange for three people making more regional trips to travel concurrently, as opposed to three separate trips?”

There are some agencies providing transportation for medical services through Medicare reimbursement, but “in my opinion they don’t work very well,” Garrett said. “There’s a whole lot of administrative challenge to making it work.”

While a ride on Rcat costs only 50-cents for the elderly and disabled, a paratransit trip from the individual’s door to services is at least $2. It may seem insignificant, but officials recognize it may be enough to prevent someone from making the trip, said Rcat Director Barbara Lilyhorn.

In McPherson, paratransit is $1, “and we don’t turn anyone away because of an inability to pay the fare,” Bolte said.

“There are very few programs that make it free,” Lilyhorn said.

“We do work with Logisticare,” Lilyhorn said, referring to a private transportation service that contracts with two of the state’s three Medicaid health insurance providers. “They buy blocks of blocks of tickets from us and distribute them back to clients, so it’s a free ride. We looked into contracts when they came out and it was a tremendous amount of paperwork, so we chose not to enter a contract.”

Getting a Logisticare ride, it was noted, requires a 48-hour advance request.

Though some local agencies can provide a free ride ticket through a case manager, riders cannot get them for round-trips, in an effort to prevent fraud.

Troe said the goal is to complete the study and begin implementing solutions by the end of the year.