Provider. Broker. Software. Morgan has seen the NEMT industry from every angle. This series is your inside scoop into Non-Emergency Medical Transportation: honest answers and actionable advice to help you navigate the chaos and scale your business.
Most NEMT owners rightfully spend a lot of time thinking about vehicles and drivers. Vehicles cost money, and drivers can be hard to find.
Both are visible problems; dispatch usually isn’t.
Dispatch is just “answering the phone”—until you dig into it. Most companies don’t realize how important dispatch is until it starts breaking things.
One thing I’ve seen over and over again in my 13 years of experience is that dispatch quietly controls your entire operation. When dispatch is good, most problems never happen. But when dispatch is bad, everything feels harder than it should.
Bad dispatch doesn’t always look dramatic. It looks like:
None of those will break you individually, but together, they create chaos.
At one or two vehicles, you can get away with it since the owner is usually dispatching anyway. You know every trip and every driver. There are few enough major issues that you can patch problems in real-time.
At some point, that stops working. Dispatch stops being “answering the phone” and starts feeling like trying to have a BBQ without a grill.
When systems fail, dispatch turns into a constant state of urgency. Phones ring nonstop, drivers are texting, facilities are calling, brokers are emailing. Whoever is dispatching isn’t managing anymore—they’re just reacting.
When dispatch lives in reaction mode, small problems pile up until everything feels like an emergency.
Dispatch is more than just scheduling; it’s communication. To drivers, dispatch is management. To facilities and other callers, dispatch is the company. If dispatch sounds frustrated, rushed, or unsure, people feel it immediately.
I’ve watched good drivers quit because dispatch made their day miserable. I’ve seen facilities stop calling companies that technically showed up on time simply because the communication was sloppy and unpredictable.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is building dispatch around a person instead of a process.
Someone becomes “the good dispatcher.” Maybe it’s you as the owner.
That feels efficient… until they’re sick, on vacation, burned out, or gone.
When dispatch is built around one person, information gets hoarded. Nobody else feels confident making decisions, and the owner becomes the backup for everything. Growth slows because adding people just adds confusion.
Scalable companies build the dispatch department around software and clear processes, not personalities.
When dispatch lives in a system, anyone trained on it can step in. Information is shared, not guarded. Decisions are consistent. Everyone gets the same friendly answer no matter who picks up the phone.
Owners are often great at solving emergencies but terrible at consistency because they need to focus on whatever problem is biggest at the moment. Dispatch requires patience, repetition, and emotional control. It requires following rules the same way every time, even when it’s inconvenient.
If the business only runs smoothly when you are dispatching, you don’t have a dispatch operation—you have a bottleneck.
Good dispatch has structure. Drivers know when to call and when not to. Facilities know what answers they’ll get. Problems are handled consistently, not emotionally. That consistency removes stress everywhere else.
Most dispatch breakdowns aren’t caused by bad people; they’re caused by unclear systems. When standards aren’t written down and priorities aren’t defined, decisions get made off memory and instinct. That works for a while, but memory and heroics don’t scale.
Eventually, something gets missed. And when dispatch lives in someone’s head instead of a system, it fails—taking drivers, contracts, and owners with it.
If you want to grow past a few vehicles, dispatch can’t be chaos. It must be calm, predictable, and repeatable.
Dispatch isn’t a small role; it’s the control center of your NEMT company. Fix dispatch before you add vehicles. Otherwise, you’re not growing—you’re just scaling chaos.
Meet Morgan: The Guy Who’s Sat in Every Chair
- The Provider: Started in the trenches. Started by managing and growing a fleet to become the largest private fleet in the state.
- The Broker: He took a 13-van fleet and scaled it into the state's #1 operator for Medicaid brokers. Managed operations for a nationwide NEMT broker, gaining a behind-the-scenes understanding of how trip placement and performance work.
- The Software: Now at MediRoutes, he helps owners improve dispatch and operations using the exact strategies that scaled his own career.