MedHaul Closes Care Gaps With Single Stop for Getting Patients to Appointments

When Erica Plybeah launched MedHaul in 2017, she didn’t just think medical transportation was a barrier to care. She’d lived it, starting with her years in Mississippi, where she helped her grandmother find rides to receive care for type 2 diabetes.

Yet Plybeah found some investors doubted the problem was real.

“I even had investors ask, ‘Do patients really have challenges with transportation? Does somebody really not have a car?’ Those were questions that I would get back then, and that has completely changed,” Plybeah, MedHaul’s founder and CEO, said in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care®.

As Plybeah knows—along with patients, providers, and caregivers—not having a way to reach an appointment opens a cascade of other problems. “When a patient cannot get to radiation, infusion, a biopsy, that’s not just a transportation failure; that’s a care delivery failure,” she said.

Her Memphis, Tennessee–based company runs a technology-enabled marketplace that connects health care organizations with credentialed nonemergency medical transportation (NEMT) companies, which MedHaul screens to ensure they meet safety and regulatory compliance requirements.¹ Plybeah said MedHaul now operates in 17 states, mostly in the Southeast, and has spent the past 2½ years concentrating on cancer care.

From the Mississippi Delta

The company’s roots begin in the Mississippi Delta, where Plybeah grew up. “My story for starting MedHaul came because of my grandmother,” whose diabetes progressed to the point where she lost both legs. “We were constantly having to manage transportation for her,” Plybeah said. “And I grew up in a community where that was normal.”

After a career in health informatics that included positions at Epic and Flatiron Health, Plybeah joined St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, “where I saw firsthand how transportation or the lack thereof impacted the institutions, and it then reminded me of all the issues that we went through with my grandmother.”

In 2017, transportation “was treated more as like an ancillary social service,” Plybeah said, and few organizations had data on NEMT, despite their recognition that it was a problem. When she asked one health system’s accounts payable director how many rides they had completed that year, “They didn’t know. They had to go through their emails to look for different transportation invoices.”

“Ultimately,” she said, “we learned that transportation isn’t just a Medicaid problem; it’s a care completion problem.”

Taking Health Systems From 20 Vendors to Single Platform

Without a central system to manage patient rides, Plybeah said, “Care teams are still spending too much time calling transportation vendors, trying to verify the right ride, the right door, if the patient needs a wheelchair, if there’s stairs in or outside of the home.”

MedHaul, by contrast, gives them a single platform for contracting. “Health entities don’t have to work with 20 different transportation companies to get the pool of transportation resources they need,” Plybeah explained. “They can just work with us directly.” From a single screen, staff can book rideshare, ambulatory, wheelchair, stretcher, or bariatric transport, as well as door-through-door assistance; the platform also tracks rides, consolidates reporting and billing, and offers dashboards on program performance.

The model also opens enterprise contracts to small, credentialed transportation businesses that struggled to win business on their own. “Large health systems don’t want to work with a 2-person transportation company. It’s too much for them to go through that procurement process,” Plybeah said. Some vendors were so low-tech that MedHaul had to help them set up email.

Supporting these small entrepreneurs is part of MedHaul’s social mission as a certified B Corp. “We found many of these companies on life support when I first started the company,” she said. Typically, the problem wasn’t the level of customer service. “It was just because they were smaller, or they didn’t know how to market, or they didn’t know how to go through a procurement process with a large enterprise.”

For Want of a Ride: What the Evidence Shows

Plybeah’s experiences are reflected in accounts from patients whose care has been limited by spotty transportation service. In one study at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York, investigators interviewed 30 patients treated for breast cancer with curative intent; half had a delayed time to treatment initiation of 45 days or more. Patients with delayed care described financial burdens, childcare challenges, and transportation problems, including rides they qualified for that arrived hours late.² “Sometimes when I had to come over … there wouldn’t be like enough shuttle buses. And I would have to wait and wait. And I was getting more anxious and more anxious,” a 77-year-old patient with delayed treatment told the investigators.²

In a recent study of uninsured and Medicaid patients with stage I/II non–small cell lung cancer, reduced geographic access to a radiation oncologist was tied to a 19% lower rate of radiotherapy, but only in counties with low vehicle ownership (rate ratio, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.74-0.89).³ At Mayo Clinic, routine screening of 81,731 patients with cancer found that adolescents and young adults had 2.15 times the odds of unmet transportation needs compared with patients older than 40.⁴ Patients in this age group may need someone to drive them to treatment, the study authors wrote, “but struggle to find daytime caregivers or drivers.”⁴

Others have recommended transportation vouchers to boost lung cancer screening⁵ and argued that federal rules limit transportation to clinical trials and oncology care.⁶

A Transportation Service Built for Oncology

“The biggest thing about cancer care is that it requires repeated transportation. The timing matters. Acuity can change during treatment,” Plybeah said. “A patient can be ambulatory going into treatment and then be wheelchair-bound leaving treatment.”

Recurring round-trip scheduling, one of MedHaul’s earliest features, took about a year to build, with input from members of the Google Calendar team. “That was game-changing for us,” she said.

Care teams can ask a driver to wait during an infusion, and clinics are alerted when patients are running late. “We would often get feedback from nurses in the early days to say, ‘Hey, let us know if this patient is going to be late, and then we can move someone else up in the chair so that we’re not here as late,’ ” Plybeah said.

Unlike rideshare drivers accustomed to airport or restaurant runs, MedHaul drivers know what to expect when patients are leaving their clinic appointments. “Oncology patients may leave fatigued, nauseous, weak, tired, and so we make sure that the drivers in our network are a good fit for those patients,” she said.

MedHaul is also built for hard-to-serve areas where patients might otherwise have required ambulance transport, at a much higher cost. Florida is MedHaul’s largest rural oncology market, where Plybeah said, “many of these patients are traveling 35 to 75-plus miles.”

Customer-provided data show 92% of patients reach appointments on time with MedHaul vs 40% without, and that partners recover up to $2 million a year. Plybeah said the savings cited came from a customer that replaced ambulance transport for nonemergent trips, cutting costs from approximately $1400 per ride to $70 to $100.

“One of our priorities as we scale is really strengthening the evidence around transportation,” she said. “So not just simply rides completed, but treatment adherence, avoided utilization, staff time, which is really critical. And no one has really been able to capture that just yet.”

Funding Beyond Medicaid

Shifts in Medicaid under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have affected MedHaul, but only slightly, Plybeah said. “Our thesis isn’t dependent on one reimbursement mechanism,” she said. “We’ve seen the need exist regardless of who ultimately pays for the ride.” Rides are funded by health plans, providers, philanthropy, state programs, and drug sponsors—the latter of which are interested in both care and transportation for clinical trials.

MedHaul has raised nearly $7 million since its founding, according to the Memphis Flyer.⁷ Its most recent disclosed round came in February 2025, when InvestTN made an undisclosed investment from its Growth Fund, which invests $250,000 to $3 million, to help MedHaul take on enterprise health care customers.⁷ Early backers included Innova Memphis, the company’s largest outside investor as of 2022, along with the Citi Impact Fund, StartUp Health, 1863 Ventures, and Launch Tennessee.⁸ More recently, the American Cancer Society became a partner and strategic investor in May 2026, Plybeah said.

Artificial Intelligence With a Human in the Loop

MedHaul was selected for the Google for Startups AI Academy.⁹ Its AI agent, CODI AI, flags transportation companies’ performance gaps and patients likely to miss rides. “There will always be a human in the loop for health care transportation decisions,” Plybeah said. “We primarily leverage AI to remove the administrative burden, so people have more capacity to show up for the patients.”

MedHaul has just launched a clinical trials transportation service; outcomes data are not yet available. Plybeah sees a fit with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, citing long-distance and recurring rides, the need for “caregiver-inclusive transportation,” and trips between lodging and treatment sites. In addition, she said a new Uber Health integration combines rideshare and complex nonemergency medical transportation under a single umbrella.

“The biggest shift that we’ve seen is for health care leaders to stop thinking about transportation as something that happens outside of health care,” Plybeah said, “and to really integrate it as part of health care infrastructure.”

References

1. MedHaul website. Updated 2026. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://gomedhaul.com/
2. Tomer D, Friedman S, Sheni R, et al. Further assessment of structural and social determinant of health effects on breast cancer care timelines: a qualitative study. Front Oncol. 2026;16:1887906. doi:10.3389/fonc.2026.1887906
3. Lian M, Struthers J, Liu Y. Geographic access, transportation resources, and early-stage lung cancer treatment among socioeconomically disadvantaged patients. Med Care. Published online August 11, 2026. doi:10.1097/MLR.0000000000002370
4. Kimball BC, Lee MK, Steinert KO, et al. Real-world evidence of disproportionate financial toxicity and health-related social needs among adolescents and young adults receiving care at an NCI-Designated Cancer Center. Curr Oncol. 2026;33(8):477. doi:10.3390/curroncol33080477
5. Reid MJ, LeLaurin JH, Ali S, et al. Identifying barriers and strategies to support a community navigator-driven approach for lung cancer screening. Curr Oncol. 2026;33(9):499. doi:10.3390/curroncol33090499
6. Pancoe S, Ko EM, Smith AJB. Federal transportation regulations limit access to clinical trials and oncology care. JAMA Oncol. 2024;10(4):425-426. doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2023.6767
7. Johnson K. MedHaul lands new investment to fuel growth. Memphis Flyer. February 10, 2025. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://memphisflyer.com/medhaul-lands-new-investment-to-fuel-growth
8. Capps M. MedHaul startup propelled by Erica Plybeah, backed by InnovaMemphis. Venture Nashville. February 17, 2022. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://www.venturenashville.com/article/1903/medhaul-startup-propelled-by-erica-plybeah-backed-by-innovamemphis
9. Gevelber L. 17 startups using AI to improve American infrastructure. News from Google. July 10, 2025. Accessed October 10, 2026. https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/entrepreneurs/ai-academy-american-infrastructure/