This startup helps hospitals remove a hidden barrier to healthcare: Getting there

Lack of transportation access is more than an inconvenience for some people in the US. It can be a matter of life or death.

In 2016, former EMT Mark Switaj saw that kidney dialysis patients were skipping life-saving treatments because they couldn’t get a ride to the clinic. He decided that transportation shouldn’t be what stands between someone and their health, and founded Roundtrip, a Philadelphia healthtech startup that helps hospitals nationwide remove what can be a major barrier to care: getting there.

“Often, these are patients who can’t walk, their health condition is to a point that they’re in a wheelchair or even sometimes bed bound,” Roundtrip CEO Sam Farmer told Technical.ly. “You can’t just put them in the back of your car or put them in an Uber.” 

Through partnerships with health systems and insurers, Roundtrip’s software simplifies the process of booking and monitoring non-emergency medical transportation, while providing hospitals real-time data on reliability, cost, and patient experience.

As the company heads toward ten years, it is financially independent and ready to continue to grow.

How it works: A connector, not a rideshare app 

Roundtrip, Farmer stressed, isn’t a ride service. It’s software that connects hospitals, clinics, and insurers with a vetted network of transportation providers who specialize in getting patients safely to and from medical appointments. 

It acts as a logistics platform that matches ride requests to qualified providers based on location, availability and patient needs. 

Hospitals use the system to schedule and monitor rides, track arrival times, and review patient feedback, while the company aggregates data to improve performance and reliability across its network.

“We don’t own vehicles or employ any drivers,” Farmer said. “We curate a network of transport providers and collect data on performance so hospitals can see who’s really delivering the best patient experience.”

Finding a customer base: Healthcare providers, not individuals

One of the ways Roundtrip differs from ride share services like Uber is that the patient taking the ride is not the one setting it up.

“We spent quite a bit of time over the years figuring out the ideal target market,” Farmer said. As it turned out, a direct-to-consumer model of medical transportation had too many barriers. Instead, the company works with healthcare providers to offer an insurance-supported service provided to their patients.  

Medicaid and Medicare Advantage plans, per Farmer, are among those that have transportation benefits that can be used to pay for Roundtrip.

“Where we settled, and where our core business is, is selling to the hospitals and health systems,” she said. “You can have a great solution that solves the problem, but it has to also be something that people are willing to pay money for to make it a business.”

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While getting patients to life-saving medical procedures is an important part of Roundtrip’s mission, wellness visits are also a priority. 

“Our hypothesis, and it can be proven in data, is that if you pay 20 bucks to get someone to their wellness visit, you can probably save thousands of dollars in emergency claims,” Farmer said. “People who are using an emergency department like an urgent care — if you can get them to the right place of treatment, you can save money across the whole system.”

Embracing its Philadelphia roots and the path to profitability

Roundtrip is now a nationally-facing company with employees spread out across the country. But at its core, Farmer said, it’s Philadelphia-born.

“Our very first collaborative health system was Cooper University, right across the bridge [in New Jersey], and we did work with Nemours Children’s Hospital [in Delaware] as well during that expiratory phase,” Farmer said. “We really took a design thinking approach to building the company.”

To found the company in 2017, Switaj raised seed funding from friends and family, and the startup took on its first big Series A investor in 2019. Over the years, Farmer said, it had several venture capital and investment funds backing it and helping it grow. About two years ago, the company became profitable. 

“We’ve been really fortunate that our VCs are very patient. They understand the industry; they’re not looking for a really quick turnaround return on their investment,” Farmer said. 

Roundtrip, she said, is no longer raising money as it’s about to round out its second profitable year. “We’ll be looking to return the money to the VCs with added bonus,” she said.

Still, Farmer’s advice to other startup leaders in healthcare is to bootstrap as long as you can. 

“We’ve been so fortunate to have phenomenal investors behind us that are collaborative and not applying a ton of pressure,” she said. “But avoiding raising that institutional capital and finding more alternative ways, whether it’s through research grants or whatever, gives a lot more flexibility in how you move forward.”

Transitioning from founder-led with a carefully selected CEO

As Roundtrip made that transition of profitability, Farmer said, Switaj made the decision to move to Chairman of the Board and chose Farmer as the next CEO in 2023. 

A self-proclaimed “Philly kid” who went to Penn and began her career in technology consulting, Farmer first came across Roundtrip when a former colleague went to work for them. She joined the company in 2019 in a leadership role called “conductor.”  

“I was the Swiss army knife of plugging as many holes as you can and making all the stuff work, which is really where I thrive,” she said. “Chaos is my drug.”

After COVID, Roundtrip’s team shifted its team to all remote. “We’re one of the companies that still has not required and doesn’t plan to require people to come back into an office,” Farmer said. “That has meant that our team has scattered a bit from our Philly core that we initially had, but we still have this affinity for Philly.”

As Roundtrip moves forward, Farmer said the focus is on closing the gaps that still leave patients without access to care. 

“There’s still a problem out there we haven’t totally solved,” Farmer said, referring to the issue of finding people who need medical transportation for preventative care, but who have slipped through the cracks. “But that’s where we continue to grow.”