FAQ
Questions buyers ask first.
Scope, funding, integrations and data, all answered plainly. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
Everything, in one place
DispatchCare is patient logistics infrastructure for community paramedicine and mobile integrated healthcare: request, broadcast, status, logistics and reporting between hospitals, payers and states on one side and CP programs on the other.
Home health, hospice, primary care and telehealth follow-up, behavioral health, non-emergency transport including dialysis runs, wheelchair and stretcher transport, interfacility transfer, and local fire and EMS for non-emergency visits, welfare checks and lift assists. Services at home include meals, DME delivery and setup, pharmacy delivery, lab draws, remote patient monitoring, social services, caregiver support and drone delivery. Providers in the network deliver the services. DispatchCare coordinates the referral and the status.
No. Emergency calls stay in CAD. DispatchCare handles scheduled, non-emergency care missions in the home.
No. The ePCR remains the record of care. DispatchCare captures the mission status and the sponsor-required outcome fields only.
No. SoFaaS deploys the app into your EHR; Epic hospitals can start from the Showroom listing; a secure web referral form covers everyone else.
Yes. Staff can create a request in the DispatchCare web app or mobile app. The mobile app is for every user type: referrers, hospital and CP staff, providers and crews, and state users. Hospitals can also refer from the chart through SoFaaS, or use the secure web referral form. Every path creates the same mission, with the same status and reporting.
Any SMART on FHIR–capable EHR via SoFaaS, VectorCare's SMART on FHIR as a Service: Epic (Showroom-listed), Oracle Health, MEDITECH, athenahealth, CPSI/TruBridge, eClinicalWorks, NextGen and others. Hospitals without SMART on FHIR use the secure web referral form.
VectorCare's proprietary tool for building SMART on FHIR apps once and deploying them into any EHR, handling launch, authorization and FHIR mapping per EHR so the hospital doesn't run an integration project.
It depends on your state's approved RHT plan; the full answer and where to check are in the RHT budget kit at dispatchcare.com/rural-health-transformation/budget-kit.
Non-supplantation asks whether the cost would have been paid anyway. For many states, scheduled preventive community paramedicine visits are not an existing billable service, so coordination and evaluation for a new or newly expanded program are new costs attached to new activity. Say that plainly, and keep emergency response and existing billing on existing funding. DispatchCare is positioned as new program infrastructure plus evaluation — not a replacement for ePCR, CAD, or an existing billable service.
"Community paramedicine software" is not one product type. Buyers usually mean one of five categories: an ePCR (the clinical record of the visit), a CAD (emergency dispatch), a care management module inside an EHR, a referral directory (who exists), or coordination infrastructure (request, routing, status, logistics, and reporting as one shared record across organizations). Those solve different jobs. Treating them as interchangeable is how a procurement cycle gets spent on the wrong problem.
Most programs need both. The ePCR remains the legal record of care and the source of NEMSIS submissions. A coordination layer carries the mission around that visit: who requested it, who accepted it, live status, attached logistics, and the sponsor outcome fields. Products that claim to be both usually ask crews to change how they document. DispatchCare (a VectorCare product) is patient logistics for community paramedicine and mobile integrated healthcare — not a 911 CAD and not a replacement for the program’s ePCR.
Ask every vendor the same questions in writing, including DispatchCare: Can a hospital submit a referral from inside the chart without an EHR project? Does the referrer see status in real time? What happens automatically when nobody accepts in the window? Can it produce the sponsor’s outcome fields without a quarter-end spreadsheet? Does it require abandoning the ePCR? Can it operate across organizations with role-scoped access and an audit log? Is data retained long enough for multi-year post-report requirements? Compare the answers — not a marketing feature matrix that goes stale.
Nothing to join the network and receive missions.
We do not publish prices. Request a demo to discuss pricing for your program. Community paramedicine programs pay nothing to join the network and receive missions.
The CP program updates status in the DispatchCare web app or mobile app, or over the API. The hospital sees it in the DispatchCare app inside the chart or in the web app, and is notified on abort or escalation.
The hospital's own ADT and registration data is joined to enrolled cohorts in the BI layer. No HIE feed is required for a single-hospital view.
Any ePCR via NEMSIS 3.5 export. Direct pulls through vendor partner programs are on the roadmap.
Yes: visit-window notification, confirm or reschedule, and a post-visit message.
Most sponsors want a quarterly narrative plus CSV, but the underlying export can run on any cadence: weekly for an internal program review, monthly for a payer, quarterly for a state RHT office. The data is the same; only the cut date and audience change.
The mission cannot move to Complete until the required outcome fields for that mission type are entered. If a field genuinely does not apply, it is marked not applicable with a reason, so it shows up as an explained gap in the export rather than a blank cell.
RHT award reporting asks for program-level reach, utilization and outcome measures tied to a funded intervention. DispatchCare's mission and outcome fields are structured so a state office can roll them up into its own RHT template without a separate data call to every subrecipient.
Yes, with an audit trail. Corrections are logged as a new row referencing the original mission ID and timestamp, so a reviewer can see what changed, when, and by whom, rather than a silently overwritten number.
The referrer sees the mission sitting in Received with an elapsed timer, not silence. After a configurable window it can be re-offered to a wider territory, escalated to a program coordinator, or returned to the referrer to route manually.
No. The first qualified accept locks the mission and every other program's view updates to Assigned elsewhere within seconds, so crews are not dispatched to a visit someone else already took.
Status updates queue on the device and sync when the connection returns; the mission stays in its last known state in the meantime rather than showing a false negative. Sustained outages surface as a stale-status flag so a coordinator can check in by phone.
Referrers can flag a mission's clinical window, for example within 24 hours of discharge, and matching favors programs with capacity inside that window. DispatchCare does not triage or replace 911; anything emergent goes to CAD, not to broadcast.
Once territory, protocols and credentials are entered, a program can go live in days, not months. There is no EHR integration project on the program side; the DispatchCare web app and mobile app are the interface.
The crew records the exception (no answer, patient declined, needs escalation, transported instead) and the mission closes with that outcome rather than being left open. The referrer is notified immediately on any escalation or abort so nothing waits for a quarterly report to surface.
Yes. Coverage, protocols and capacity are declared once; missions from any credentialed referrer route through the same queue, and reporting can be filtered by sponsor so each funder sees only its own cohort.
Equipment, supplies, interpretation and mobility needs travel as structured fields on the mission itself, set by the referrer or added by the crew, so a walker or interpreter request is not buried in a free-text note the next person has to find.
Retention is configurable per customer contract. The federal rule for RHT records is 2 CFR 200.334: recipients and subrecipients keep federal award records for three years from the date they submit the final financial report, and longer if litigation, a claim or an audit starts before the three years end.
You send a cohort file: member identifiers, eligibility window and the mission template to run. DispatchCare sends back mission status, visit outcome fields and exception reasons, joinable to your own claims and utilization data.
Data moves under a BAA on a minimum-necessary basis: the fields a mission needs to run and report, not a full chart. See the security page for retention and access-control detail.
No. One contract with VectorCare reaches every credentialed program in the network, so a multi-county or multi-state cohort does not require a separate agreement with each local program.
No fixed minimum. Cohorts range from a single high-risk panel to a regional population; coverage depends on which programs are credentialed in the counties involved.
EMS agencies, fire departments, hospital-based EMS services, private ambulance operators, DME vendors, home health agencies and non-emergency mobility providers. Joining and receiving missions costs nothing. You declare the counties, protocols and hours you cover, and you see only missions that match.
Yes. You only see missions that match the counties, protocols and hours you declared, and you can decline any individual mission that isn't a fit.
No. Missions are worked from the DispatchCare web app or mobile app on devices your team already uses; there is no equipment purchase or install required to join.
Yes. Coverage, hours and participation are yours to change or end at any time; there is no lock-in to keep receiving missions.
Hospitals without SMART on FHIR can start the same week with the secure web referral form. A SoFaaS launch into a SMART on FHIR EHR is typically the shortest integration project your IT team will run, since SoFaaS handles launch, authorization and FHIR mapping.
The same review any BAA-covered vendor goes through: access controls, audit logging and retention are documented on the security page for your IT and compliance teams.
Yes. Any DispatchCare deployment that handles protected health information runs under a signed business associate agreement between the covered entity and VectorCare. We can work from your paper. Send your standard BAA with your security questionnaire, or request ours on the BAA page.
On AWS in the United States. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest.
No. DispatchCare is a VectorCare product, built on the same coordination platform VectorCare's health-system customers already use for patient logistics, applied specifically to community paramedicine and mobile integrated healthcare.
It is not a 911 CAD and not an ePCR. It does not dispatch emergency calls and does not replace the clinical record of a visit; it coordinates the referral, the mission and the reporting around visits that CP and MIH programs already run.
No. Some states use their own managing vendors to run onboarding and funding. DispatchCare works alongside that structure. DispatchCare is a VectorCare product. VectorCare is a vendor or subcontractor to subrecipients. It does not administer RHT funds and does not decide what is allowable.
Yes. VectorCare signs partnership forms and letters of support for RHT applicants, in its role as a vendor or subcontractor. To ask, request a demo or send a message through the contact form. Include your state and your application due date.
CMS awards funds to the state. The state's approved plan sets out uses, and the administering agency executes subaward agreements with subrecipients: hospitals, EMS agencies, health centers and other local organizations. Those subrecipients may then contract with vendors for specific deliverables.
2 CFR Part 200 sets a federal expenditure threshold above which an organization must undergo a single audit. Whether you cross that threshold depends on total federal awards expended in the year.
There is no fixed federal timeline. It depends on your state's plan, the subaward execution schedule and your own protocol and staffing readiness. Build in time for medical director sign-off, EMS scope-of-practice confirmation and a pilot cohort before full rollout.
2 CFR Part 200 procurement standards generally require a documented, fair process appropriate to the dollar amount, on top of your own organization's procurement policy.
VectorCare is registered in SAM.gov and is on state purchasing platforms. Your procurement office picks the purchasing method. Request a demo to discuss the options for your organization.
CMS announced first-year awards on Dec 29, 2025, with per-state amounts ranging from $147 million to $281 million.
Yes. DispatchCare operates in all states. In each county, missions go to the programs that are credentialed there. Each state also has a page on how Rural Health Transformation works in that state.
You attest to the counties, protocols and hours you're credentialed and staffed for when you join. DispatchCare does not independently verify state licensure; that remains between your agency and your state EMS office.
Yes. Any number of staff can be added to your agency's account, and missions route to whoever on your team is logged in and covering that territory at the time.
Book a demo or reach out through the contact form; we'll walk your team through the referral and mission flow before you commit to anything.
Yes. Cohort templates are defined per population, so a rising-risk cohort and a post-discharge cohort can run at the same time under the same contract, each with its own cadence and outcome fields.
Yes. Mission templates can include sponsor-specific fields alongside the standard reach, delivery, follow-through and utilization measures, so a state or payer requirement that isn't already covered can be added without a separate system.
Access is scoped to the sponsor's own referrals and cohort. A hospital, payer or state office sees the missions tied to what it sent in, not another sponsor's data on the same network.
See a mission go from the chart to the home and back.
A 15-minute walkthrough with a coordinator view, a CP program view and the dashboard your sponsor will read.