Goals

The process is initiated with a medical prescription requiring a transport for a given patient. That prescription is approved, and it’s approval will either create a new transport group for that patient, or it will place the patient in an already existent transport group (via PTMS Grouping Algorithm). It is then accepted by a Transporter Entity (in Portugal, mostly Firefighter Associations and Red Cross) that will execute the transport. When it arrives to the destination, the Provider Entity (providers of the healthcare services required for the patients) confirms the presence of the patients, and indicate their entry and exit dates. After that action, the value of the transport group is calculated (via PTMS Accounting Algorithm, configured with the current legislation). The valued transport groups are then presented to the Transporter Entities which will accept the values calculated. If for some reason, the Transporter Entities find that something is incorrect, they can signal the transport group as pending. When all the transport groups are accounted, the Transporter entity can close the month, and send an issue to the paying entity, referring the PTMS calculated amount.

Differentiation factors

  • Fully automatize a process that was done manually in paper support.
  • The issue collation was very hard to do, and very error prone, since the collation process was also completely manual. With PTMS, the problem is solved, because the system knows everything it needs to know for the correct valuing of a transport group. If the Transporter Entity accepts that valuing, there is no further need of manual collation.
  • Because of the previously mentioned, the payment times were also decreased, which was a great motivation for the Transporter entities to join PTMS.
  • Automatic constitution and allocation of transport groups
  • Precise Expense control on Patient Transportation. Expense reports are produced each month and sent to the respective RHA’s

Currently, a process of expansion of the hospital transport management system is underway, with a view to operating in a regional hospital platform, allowing for multi-contract management, with the purpose of bringing the public hospitals together in the future. context of the respective health region, allowing the objectification of the concept of centralized contractualisation of transport services.

The patient transport management system currently has approximately 50,000 users distributed between transport requesting entities, transporting entities and healthcare providers.