When a clinic, treatment center or care program starts looking for patient travel and lodging services, it is usually because the informal version has stopped working: the coordinator who handled it is overwhelmed, a family arrived in the wrong place, or somebody asked how many nights the program generated last year and nobody could answer. The category is wider than most people expect and the options are built for very different situations. This page lays them out plainly, including where Carepassage sits, so you can tell which one you actually need. Patient travel and lodging services are the functions a program provides so that a patient who lives far away can get to the site, stay near it and get home: a place to sleep near the right building, sometimes flights and ground transport, communication through the trip, and a record of what happened. They are provided in five ways today: an in-house travel desk, a clinical-trial travel vendor, a nonprofit hospitality network, a consumer travel site the patient uses alone, or a self-book platform the program issues in its own name. Which one fits depends on who pays for the trip, how long patients stay, how many of them travel, and whether the program needs a record.
Strip the branding off and every provider in this category does some combination of four things. The differences between them are which of the four they do, who pays, and what comes back to the program afterwards.
Five kinds of provider cover the category. They overlap less than their descriptions suggest, because each was built for a specific payer and a specific trip shape.
The category sorts itself once you answer these in order. The first one decides more than the other three together.
The thing that separates a patient travel service from a hotel list is what comes back. A program that arranges travel through any of the first four providers above learns something from some of them and nothing from the last one. The self-book and in-house options are the two that can return a complete record, and the record is what turns lodging from a favour the program does for patients into a part of the program it can see, report on and improve.
At minimum, ask any provider whether you will be able to answer these afterwards: how many patients travelled last quarter, from where, to which of your sites, for how many nights, at which properties, at what cost to the family, and what they thought of the stay. A service that cannot answer them is a service you are using blind.
Carepassage is a self-book patient lodging platform for clinics and treatment programs whose patients travel to reach them. Your coordinator fills in a short form when a visit is scheduled. The patient receives a link branded as your program, sees hotels near the site they are visiting ranked by distance, books the room and pays with their own card. Five emails in your name carry them from booking through the trip home, and every stay lands on your record. Your team can also book on a patient's behalf from the same account, and the same platform serves care navigation teams and health plans that book on a member's behalf.
It costs your program nothing: no subscription, no per-seat fee, no setup cost, no card on file. The hotel side pays a commission on every booking, the same one a consumer travel site collects today. Pricing is all-in from the first screen, and the number the patient sees is the number charged. We do not claim to beat a rate your program has negotiated for itself, because sometimes we do not; what a negotiated code cannot do is cover the patient who books elsewhere or report anything back to you.
What it is not: it is not a housing program, it handles stays of roughly one to fourteen nights; it does not arrange ground transport; it is not a concierge staffed to hold a patient's hand through a trip, which is what a trial vendor or an in-house desk is for. If your program needs one of those, we will tell you rather than sell you the wrong thing.
The functions a program provides so that a patient who lives far away can reach the site, stay near it and get home: lodging near the right building, sometimes flights and ground transport, communication through the trip, and a record of what happened. Providers range from in-house hospital travel desks and clinical-trial travel vendors to nonprofit hospitality networks and self-book platforms a program issues in its own name.
Usually a self-book platform, sometimes alongside a nonprofit house partnership for the families who qualify. Trial vendors and in-house desks are built around a payer holding the card; when the patient pays, the service has to let them pay and still return the record to the program.
Some do. In-house desks and clinical-trial vendors typically arrange flights and ground transport as part of a funded trip. Self-book lodging platforms are built around the hotel, which is the part of the trip that has to be near the site and the part most programs are asked about.
It depends on the model. Clinical-trial vendors charge per-patient service fees to the sponsor. In-house desks are salaried staff. Nonprofit houses are free to the family and funded by donors. Carepassage costs the program nothing, because the hotel side pays a commission on each booking the way it pays any travel site.
If the service handles patient information on the program's behalf, a BAA is the normal way to cover it, and a provider built for healthcare will sign one as part of setup. Consumer travel sites will not. Whether your specific arrangement requires one is a question for your counsel or compliance officer.
A staffed desk is a hiring project and a trial vendor is a contract. A self-book platform is provisioned rather than built: Carepassage accounts are typically live within a day of signing, with nothing to install and no data to migrate.