The process of assessing and authorising transport has always been a problem for Councils, Ambulance Services and other service providers. Limited resources and increasing demand for transport has in recent years focused service provider attention on transport authorisation based on passenger eligibility. Most transport organisations provide transport to passengers who meet some form of eligibility criteria i.e. medical need, social need, disability etc. Methods of assessing eligibility range from complex pre-transport assessments to simple authorising processes with little or no control.

In response to the increasing importance placed on transport authorisation, CCS, in conjunction with its many clients, has developed a new software module within its patient and special needs passenger transport system (APTS) to automatically assess each new request for transport against user defined eligibility criteria. The new criteria based software formalises the transport eligibility assessment process by filtering and ranking each new journey request for transport against agreed criteria.

For each service type, the user can specify eligibility criteria and assign levels of importance and other conditional attributes. The new software is embedded in the journey registration process within APTS and is presented to the operator in decision model format. Eligibility assessment data is stored against each passenger master record to facilitate analysis and reporting.