The record is the product: what NEMT fleets and adult day centers have in common
September 7, 2026 · Prasar Group · 6 min read
On the surface, a transportation company and a day center have little in common. One moves people; the other hosts them. But look at how each one gets paid and the two businesses collapse into a single shape. A service was delivered to an eligible person at a specific time and place, and someone has to prove it.
We build software for both, and the more time we spend with operators the more convinced we are that the record of service is not a byproduct of the work. It is the work, as far as the payer is concerned.
Two records, one structure
An NEMT trip record needs the member, the date, the pickup and drop-off locations, the actual times at each, the driver and vehicle, and in most broker contracts a signature or another form of proof of delivery. An adult day attendance record needs the participant, the date, arrival and departure times, and the person or system that captured them. Strip the vocabulary and both records answer the same four questions: who, when, where, and says who.
Payers audit against those four questions. New York's Medicaid inspector general, Pennsylvania's Department of Aging, and every state transportation broker publish some version of them as a minimum documentation standard. When a claim is denied or clawed back, it is almost always because one of the four could not be answered from the record.
Why paper and spreadsheets fail the same way
Paper sign-in sheets and hand-kept trip logs share a flaw that has nothing to do with handwriting. They are written after the fact, by a person who is also doing something else. The arrival time on a sign-in sheet is whatever the receptionist wrote when she got to it. The pickup time on a manifest is whatever the driver remembered at the end of the run.
A spreadsheet does not fix this. It just moves the transcription step. Someone still types in what happened from memory or from paper, and now the record is both delayed and editable without a trace. Overwriting a cell leaves no history. When an auditor asks why a time changed, there is no answer.
What a durable record looks like
The properties that make a record hold up are the same across both businesses, and they are the properties we build into every product.
- Captured at the moment. The timestamp comes from the device at the stop or at the door, not from a person's recollection later. In ZeitRide the driver app records actual pickup and drop-off times as the driver taps through the trip. In Adult Day Genie the participant checks in on arrival and the time is set then.
- Attributed. Every entry carries who or what created it. An anonymous entry is an entry an auditor can discard.
- Append-only. Corrections happen. A driver taps the wrong stop; a participant is checked in under the wrong name. The fix is a new entry with its own timestamp and its own author, and the original stays visible. This is the single property that turns a record from a claim into evidence.
- Retrievable on demand. A records request for ninety days of manifests, or a plan review of six months of attendance, should be an export, not a project.
Why this matters more every year
Medicaid program integrity enforcement is not getting gentler. States are matching claims against GPS logs, cross-checking attendance across providers for overlapping billing, and using data analytics to pick audit targets. An operator whose records were already complete absorbs a new documentation rule without rework. An operator reconstructing records from paper discovers the rule through denials.
That is the reason the record is the product. Everything else in our software, dispatch, routing, care plans, billing, exists to make the record easier to create correctly and impossible to lose.
For the specifics of how each product handles it, see ZeitRide's audit history and Adult Day Genie's attendance tracking.