ModivCare Lean Consulting Services
ModivCare Standing Orders Rapid Improvement Event
Converting Five Intake Channels into One Standard Path
THE CHALLENGE
Scattered Workflows
ModivCare, a national non-emergency medical transportation provider, was receiving standing-order trip requests through five separate channels — phone, email, fax, TripCare, and LCAD — each handled manually and inconsistently. The fragmentation was driving up call volume, rejections, missed trips, and unit cost. The opportunity surfaced two months earlier, when Boulder Associates facilitated a multi-day Value Stream Mapping workshop with ModivCare's team in Miami Lakes, Florida, mapping current-state processes across reservations, routing, ride assist, and complaints. Standing orders emerged as one of the sharpest opportunities, setting up a focused follow-on event.
THE APPROACH
When Less is More
In July 2021, Boulder Associates' Mike Oswald facilitated a five-day Rapid Improvement Event with seven cross-functional ModivCare teammates carrying a combined 48-plus years of experience. The team mapped the current state across every intake method, using gemba ride-along observation and a member/facility experience lens to keep the analysis grounded in the real journey rather than the org chart. Rather than optimize five channels in parallel, they designed a future state built on TripCare automation and a single national standard process, naming a TripCare Product Champion to lead the UX/UI redesign, and capturing quick wins live throughout the week.
RESULTS
From Mapping to Momentum
The redesign cut TripCare processing from 27 steps to 9 and reduced "clean" standing-order processing time from 46 seconds to 24 — a roughly 48% improvement — while eliminating verification calls that had been running about 10 minutes each. Same-week quick wins included a national standard intake form, updated CSR scripts, a TripCare-to-LCAD field mapping fix, and the removal of Member ID as a HIPAA token from TripCare and MARA. Together, the changes are targeted at lower unit cost, higher TripCare utilization, and fewer calls, rejections, and missed trips going forward.
The Miami Lakes workshop had already left its mark before the Denver event began — participants described breaking down silos, gaining empathy across departments, and hearing, for many, that their opinions on process problems were heard for the first time. The standing-orders event carried that same spirit into execution: a rapid, on-site push that turned a mapped opportunity into a measurably faster, simpler process within a single week.
