Ride Care transforms mental health and substance abuse transportation with Nextbillion’s AI-powered routing

About Ride Care

Ride Care is a compassionate alternative transportation service operating within the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) Comprehensive Crisis Response System. This pioneering mental health and substance abuse transportation system in the United States offers secure transportation services for individuals experiencing psychiatric emergencies.

Need of the Hour: Quick Transportation for Mental Health Crises

Ride Care provides 24-hour mental health and substance use transportation services in Oklahoma, an alternative transportation approach aiming to de-stigmatize mental health and addiction disorders. Replacing the involvement of law enforcement (including restraints, flashing lights, and sometimes jail), Ride Care uses a person-centered, trauma-informed approach to transport individuals in need of psychiatric treatment or substance use recovery support. They utilize a fleet of unmarked but secure vehicles with specially trained drivers to transfer individuals to the nearest treatment facility.

Ride Care has grown from 60 rides a day to almost 200 rides a day and has expanded operations to Kansas and Louisiana. They are projected to accomplish about 55,000 transports in 2025. Ride Care uses Samsara’s platform to track its vehicles, monitor driver patterns, and get real-time visibility into the location of every car. Despite using Samsara’s platform, the volume of transports each day created challenges for their dispatch team. As they manually planned each route, dispatchers experienced:

• Difficulty in defining the sequence of pickups and drop-offs, impacting operational performance across the state.
• Inability to add necessary constraints (driver time, ADA needs, rider age limitations), resulting in longer travel times and service durations.
• Scheduling drivers and allocating vehicles to ensure timely service delivery and manage driver schedules.

Ride Care was looking for a route optimization solution that could seamlessly integrate with its existing Samsara platform and address these challenges.

The solution: NextBillion.ai Route Optimization API integration with Samsara

To address these challenges and accommodate their growing demand, Ride Care integrated NextBillion.ai’s Route Optimization API with their existing Samsara platform. This solution addressed key concerns:

• Handling special needs and underage passengers: The system now differentiates between general passenger loads and those requiring special attention, such as clients needing ADA-accessible vehicles or those under 18 years old. Capacity constraints ensure that the correct vehicle is scheduled or enforce strict measures that prevent mixing under-18 passengers with older passengers in the same vehicle.  
• Re-optimization for last-minute changes: Advanced re-optimization capabilities enable them to adjust routes on the fly and reroute drivers in the event of cancellations or additions.
• Integrating with Samsara: The integration of the two platforms streamlined workflow, optimized routes, and seamlessly pushed information to Samsara. 
• Visualizing downtime/gaps in driver schedules: With NextBillion.AI’s UI, the dispatch team can easily track driver schedules and detect gaps in manpower in relation to actual needs. Using checkboxes, they can also select specific drivers for optimization.
• Considering traffic patterns: Drivers can dynamically adapt to real-time traffic conditions.

Outcomes: Benefits of Route Optimization and Samsara Integration

The integration of NextBillion.ai’s Route Optimization with Samsara yielded significant benefits, enabling Ride Care to smoothly cater to the rapid growth in ride volume:

• Improved Route Optimization: The routes dispatched are optimized, taking into consideration constraints like driver availability, passenger types (especially under 18), and the most efficient order for pickup and drop-offs. 
• Samsara Integration: The optimized routes are directly dispatched into the drivers’ Samsara app, overcoming the human error factor of manually entering each route.
• Flexibility and Real-time Adjustment: Routes are quickly re-optimized in response to cancellations or additions, maintaining efficiency even with last-minute changes.
• Scalability: The solution is scalable and supports their goals as they expand operations to new states like Kansas and Louisiana.
• Data-driven decisions: Looking at transportation patterns, Ride Care uses the information to guide decisions on schedule adjustments and fleet expansion.

The elimination of manual processes involved in route planning, streamlined workflow, and dispatch of optimized routes have improved efficiency and reduced fuel costs, driver time, and overall operational expenses.