NEMT leads: building a list of facilities that need rides from public data

The NEMT leads worth chasing are facilities, not individual riders: places whose patients or members need a ride on a schedule, week after week. Most of them appear on public lists you can download for free. The work is pulling those lists together for the area your vans cover, ranking them by how many trips they could send, and then calling and visiting on a routine you actually keep.

If you have not yet sized your market, start with our guide to NEMT market research, which estimates demand county by county. This page picks up where that one ends: turning the facilities in your area into a list of named prospects. Once a prospect agrees to meet, our page on NEMT facility contracts covers the pitch and the written agreement.

The free lists that cover most facilities

Four federal lists and one state list cover the facility types that book the most rides. Each answers a different question, so pull all five.

The CMS files are on the Provider Data Catalog at data.cms.gov, each with a CSV download and a phone number for every facility:

• Dialysis. The listing modified June 16, 2026 has a row for every Medicare-registered dialysis facility. Sort on its station count, its in-center hemodialysis flag, and the Late Shift column. Only 1,148 centers answer yes, which matters if your drivers work evenings. A Chain Organization column lets you group centers run by the same company and call them together.
• Nursing homes. The August 2026 provider file lists certified beds and average residents per day for each home, plus whether it sits inside a continuing care retirement community. Federal rules (42 CFR 483.50) require a nursing home to help residents arrange rides to outside lab and imaging services when they need the help, so the home’s staff are the people who call a ride company.
• Hospitals. The general information file, modified July 22, 2026, splits hospitals by type. It lists 3,107 acute care hospitals, 1,382 critical access hospitals and 624 psychiatric hospitals, and flags which ones run an emergency department. Psychiatric hospitals and emergency departments are where behavioral health and after-hours discharge rides start.

CMS refreshes these files on a set schedule. The dialysis listing’s next update is due October 28, 2026, so download fresh copies each quarter rather than working from an old spreadsheet.

Pulling clinics and day programs from the NPI Registry

Clinics that generate repeat rides do not appear in the CMS files, but any clinic that bills insurers electronically must have an NPI (45 CFR 162.410). Every NPI carries a taxonomy code describing the provider type, and the NPI Registry lets you search by that code plus a city, state or ZIP code. These codes from the current NUCC code set (version 26.1, July 1, 2026) point to the most ride volume:

• 261QE0700X, End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) Treatment clinic. A cross-check on the CMS dialysis file.
• 261QM2800X, Methadone clinic. See Medicaid rides to drug rehab for how these programs work.
• 261QA0600X, Adult Day Care clinic or center, and 251C00000X, Day Training, Developmentally Disabled Services. See adult day care transportation contracts.
• 261QX0203X, Radiation Oncology clinic or center. Most courses run five days a week.
• 261QR0400X, Rehabilitation clinic or center, and 261QM0801X, Mental Health clinic or center, including community mental health centers.

Search organization NPIs only (enumeration type NPI-2), since individual clinicians at the same address will flood the results. The registry’s API returns at most 200 records per request and lets you skip up to 1,000, so a single search tops out at 1,200 records over six requests. Split a large area into cities or ZIP codes to stay under that limit. For a statewide pull, the free monthly NPPES download (the September 14, 2026 file is about 1.1 GB zipped) has every NPI in one file you can filter.

Treat an NPI as a lead, not proof of a working business. CMS states that issuing an NPI does not ensure or validate that the provider is licensed or credentialed. The NPI rule also requires separate numbers only for parts of an organization that would be billing providers on their own, so a radiation center run inside a hospital may appear only under the hospital’s NPI.

Assisted living and adult day: your state’s license list

States, not CMS, license assisted living, so those communities come from your state’s licensing agency. Most agencies have a public search. Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, for example, runs a facility locator on its Health Finder site: pick a provider type such as Assisted Living Facilities, Adult Day Care Center or APD Licensed Adult Day Training, narrow it by county, and download the results.

Search your state agency’s site for “facility locator” or “license search,” and rerun it each quarter: a newly licensed community may not have settled on a ride provider yet. The guide to senior living partnerships covers what these communities need from a provider.

How to rank prospects by likely weekly trips

Rank every prospect by how many trips it could send in a normal week, because that decides which doors you knock on first. CMS’s 2023 report to Congress on Medicaid NEMT measured how often riders travel for each kind of care, and it gives a clear order:

• Dialysis came first. Medicaid riders who used NEMT for dialysis rode on 4.4 to 4.8 days a month for it, the highest frequency of any service type in the report.
• Medication treatment for opioid use disorder came second, with each of those riders averaging 3 to 3.5 monthly ride days.
• Behavioral health was far lower per rider, at 0.6 to 1.0 ride days a month, even though it made up a large share of all rides.
• Lab and imaging visits averaged 0.5 monthly ride days.

The same report found that NEMT users with an intellectual or developmental disability averaged 3.2 monthly ride days in 2021, and day programs serve that group. Radiation is the other steady source: according to the National Cancer Institute, most people getting external beam radiation are treated daily, Monday through Friday, for a series of weeks.

That gives you a working order. Put dialysis centers and opioid treatment programs at the top, then day programs and radiation centers, then large nursing homes, then hospitals. Within each group, sort by size: stations for dialysis, average residents per day for nursing homes, and drive time from your garage for everything. For example, a 30-station center 15 minutes away beats a 40-station center an hour away, because empty miles eat the margin. Mark late-shift dialysis centers if your drivers work evenings.

Hospitals sit lower on weekly volume but higher on urgency. Discharge rides are irregular, same-day and often wheelchair or stretcher, so they suit a company that can answer fast. The guide to becoming a hospital transportation vendor covers what hospitals require before staff can book you.

Put a name next to every facility

A facility’s main number gets you to the front desk, so the list is not finished until each row names the person who arranges rides. For two facility types, federal staffing rules tell you who that is before you call:

• Dialysis centers: the social worker. Under 42 CFR 494.80, every dialysis patient’s care team includes a social worker, and transportation problems end up on that desk. Our dialysis transportation contracts guide covers what clinics expect.
• Nursing homes over 120 beds: the full-time social worker that 42 CFR 483.70(o) requires at that size. In the August 2026 CMS file, 4,262 homes have more than 120 certified beds. In a smaller home, ask for whoever schedules resident appointments.

For hospitals, clinics and senior living, the facility contracts guide lists who to ask for and what each one needs. Write the name, title and direct line into your list as soon as you get them. A lead without a name is still a cold call.

A weekly routine for working the list

A list only turns into trips if you work it every week. This routine fits around a day of dispatch:

1. Monday: pick ten. Choose ten prospects from the top of your ranked list and confirm each phone number is current.
2. Tuesday and Wednesday: call. Ask for the person who arranges rides and find out which trips the current provider turns down or runs late. Write down the answer, not just “left message.”
3. Thursday: visit one area. Drop in on the facilities you reached by phone, grouped by neighborhood so the drive is short. Bring a single printed page listing service levels, hours and the booking line.
4. Friday: follow up. Send what you promised and set the next contact date for each prospect.
5. Every quarter: refresh. Download new CMS files and rerun your NPI searches to catch new facilities.

Email follow-ups fall under the federal CAN-SPAM Act. The FTC says the law makes no exception for business-to-business email, so each message needs your valid physical postal address and a working opt-out, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days. A sales email should never carry a patient’s name or health details.

Never pay anyone per rider or per trip they send you. Buying a contact list is a marketing cost; paying someone to steer Medicaid or Medicare riders your way falls under the Anti-Kickback Statute. The federal safe harbor for referral services (42 CFR 1001.952(f)) protects only fees charged equally to every participant and based on the service’s operating cost, so a lead service that bills per referred rider falls outside it.

When a lead turns into a facility account

The first trips for a new facility are an audition, and the facility judges you on pickups and updates. HealthRide gives each facility a portal where staff request rides and watch their vehicles live, so nobody has to phone dispatch for an arrival time. HealthRide’s on-time report gives you the numbers to bring to each monthly check-in, which is the proof a facility needs to keep booking. See reports.