The following is a guest article by Elizabeth Jepsen, Chief of Staff at Kinetik
A Q&A recap of Kinetik’s industry panel on the future of non-emergency medical transportation
When transportation breaks down, so does care. That was the throughline of a recent Kinetik webinar panel discussion on The State of NEMT 2026: The Future of Healthcare Transportation. Moderated by Mohammad Hossain of Kinetik, the panel featured the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico; Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a practicing neuroradiologist and former Chief AI officer at Kaiser Permanente who now leads carcompany.ai; and Tonya Copeland, Chief Growth Officer at Liberty Health and board chair of NEMTAC. Kinetik Co-Founder and CEO, Sufian Chowdhury, joined the conversation as well.
Their shared message: non-emergency medical transportation isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a care problem. The webinar’s panel discussion highlighted what needs to change in NEMT.
NEMT as Care Coordination, Not Logistics
When did you stop viewing NEMT as “just a ride”?
The shift happened early for the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico. He saw firsthand that transportation was often the single biggest barrier standing between a rural Medicaid member and the care they needed. In New Mexico, it isn’t out of the ordinary for patients to drive 100 to 150 miles round trip to reach an appointment, a real challenge for anyone working an hourly job.
The takeaway: the appointment starts the moment a member walks out their front door, not when they arrive at the clinic. That means transportation needs the same coordination as the visit itself. And reliability is what determines whether members trust the benefit enough to use it at all.
What Clinical Experience Teaches About Technology’s Limits
What did practicing medicine teach you about where technology helps, and where it doesn’t?
Dr. Ainsley MacLean has spent her career on both sides of the equation, treating patients as a Harvard-trained radiologist and building AI strategy as Kaiser Permanente’s first chief AI officer. That dual view shapes how she thinks about value. True value, she said, means tying every service back to outcomes: longer, healthier lives. Transportation, she argued, is a spoke the industry has largely overlooked on that wheel.
That thinking led carcompany.ai to rename its drivers as “navigators,” treating their experience as being just as important as the patient’s, the payer’s, or the physician’s. As care shifts from hospitals to outpatient settings and homes, MacLean sees navigators as more than a ride. They’re a touchpoint that can catch a missed mammogram or an overdue cancer screening before it becomes something bigger.
What Providers See That Plans Don’t
Where have you seen a disconnect within NEMT?
Tonya Copeland’s perspective comes from having run an NEMT program herself. Early in her career, leading a multi-state agency serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the elderly, she couldn’t find a single vendor willing to transport the population she served. Eventually, her agency became an NEMT vendor out of necessity.
More than a decade later, Copeland still sees the same gap. The label “non-emergency,” she said, undersells how urgent and important these trips are. Missing a ride to a dialysis appointment or a primary care visit isn’t a scheduling inconvenience. For the member, it can feel like an emergency. Transportation, she said, is foundational. Without it, care simply doesn’t happen.
The Systemic Fix
After a decade building Kinetik, what’s your view of what needs to change in NEMT?
Kinetik CEO Sufian Chowdhury pointed to a structural problem: NEMT was never designed as part of the healthcare continuum, which is why so much value leaks out of the system. He pointed to a wave of rural hospital closures on the horizon, more than 400 expected in the coming years, that will roughly double the distance many patients travel to reach care.
Chowdhury’s math is stark. He estimates the true cost of missed and delayed care from transportation gaps at more than $150 billion, dwarfing the roughly $8 billion NEMT market itself. For decades, he said, payers have treated NEMT as a transaction rather than weighing the far larger cost of getting it wrong.
Building a Network That Lasts
What does it take to keep transportation providers viable?
For the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico, the focus has been on fair pricing. Transportation providers need to be paid enough to stay viable rather than paying them the lowest per-mile rate, which hurts the network in the long run. Health plans and brokers need to treat transportation providers as partners.
Copeland sees reason for optimism in new rural health transformation grants tied to HR1, several of which name transportation explicitly. Tennessee’s grant, for example, focuses specifically on transportation technology, a sign that states are starting to treat the problem as solvable.
Trust, Funding, and the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Spotlight
The conversation turned to funding, and here the panelists largely agreed: the system is working against itself. Chowdhury pointed out the irony of health plans paying liquidated damages when a ride falls through, dollars that could instead fund surge pricing to make sure the ride actually happens. Rising gas prices compound the problem on both ends, keeping drivers from taking trips and keeping patients from following through on appointments. Chowdhury described patients in Pikeville, Kentucky skipping medical visits because they couldn’t afford the drive.
The stakes go beyond inconvenience. Chowdhury said that members who miss a methadone or dialysis appointment are more likely to end up in the emergency department in the near future. Copeland’s answer is professionalization: treating NEMT drivers and the systems that support them as core healthcare infrastructure, not an administrative afterthought.
Closing: Rapid-Fire
To close, Hossain posed one question to each panelist: with 5.8 million Americans missing or delaying care due to transportation barriers, what’s one thing you can do to move that number in the next five years?
The CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico recommends to over-communicate as members need to hear, repeatedly, that the ride will be reliable and safe before they’ll trust it enough to use it. Copeland is staying focused on professionalizing the industry at the federal level through her work with NEMTAC and CMS. MacLean wants to redefine quality itself, measuring NEMT by verified health outcomes rather than verified miles driven. And Chowdhury’s answer was blunt: fix the funding structure now, before chronic underfunding turns into a genuine crisis.
Four different seats at the table. One shared conclusion: transportation is care.
Watch the webinar to get the full conversation.
About Elizabeth Jepsen
Elizabeth Jepsen is Chief of Staff at Kinetik, where she partners closely with the CEO and executive team to drive strategic alignment, operational rigor, and cross-functional execution. Working at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and public policy, she supports initiatives that strengthen Medicaid transportation infrastructure, improve accountability, and expand access to care for vulnerable populations. She leads executive planning, board and investor communications, and enterprise-wide initiatives—bringing clarity, ownership, and momentum to complex, high-growth environments. Prior to her current role, Elizabeth built her career in marketing and communications across nonprofit organizations, higher education, and hospital systems. She led brand strategy, executive communications, content development, and integrated marketing campaigns designed to elevate mission-driven institutions and deepen stakeholder engagement. Across every role, she is driven by a commitment to helping organizations communicate with clarity, operate with excellence, and create measurable impact.
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