A transit provider in rural Iowa has partnered with a local hospital to develop a system to ensure patients have transportation to medical appointments.
The project, known as Health Connector, uses a digital dashboard accessible to both the Heart of Iowa Regional Transit Agency (HIRTA) and the Dallas County Hospital to arrange transportation for patients on HIRTA’s on-demand transit service.
“The dashboard is valuable for monitoring situations where a patient might be running late for an appointment. The hospital staff can go ahead and check to see if a trip has been scheduled, and see if there are any delays with the ride,” Danny Schnathorst, HIRTA marketing and communications manager, said Monday during a webinar hosted by the Transportation Research Board.
The project began as a pilot in 2020, funded by a $2.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, with a goal of identifying opportunities to make transportation more accessible, affordable and efficient for underserved communities. Over the next several years the project was designed, in partnership with Dallas County Hospital and Arcadis, the technology provider, to create a dashboard accessible to riders and transit and hospital staff.
Health Connector is now in its third phase, which includes demonstrating the deployment, exchanging lessons learned with partners and other outside groups, and sustaining operations for five years. The project includes a dedicated kiosk in the hospital where transit users can input their Heath Connector trip. Users can also use HIRTA’s app or web portal. No medical information is stored in the dashboard, or required for booking a trip.
“This is simply for making sure that everybody has transportation for any appointment that they might need,” Schnathorst said.
The older adult population in Dallas County grew 12 percent from 2000 to 2010, and is expected to double by 2030, Schnathorst said, noting, “transportation is often a major barrier in accessing healthcare.”
HIRTA also partnered with Dallas County Hospital to introduce NaviLens, a wayfinding technology to aid the visually impaired. People use it to scan large QR codes with their smartphone, and then receive key bits of information like real-time travel updates, elevator status, or step-by-step navigational information in numerous languages. Riders do not have to see the codes in order for their phones to pick them up. Blind users can simply hold their phone at chest level and the app will find the code.
“It does offer a straightforward and efficient way for users to receive real-time orientation and guidance,” Schnathorst said.
App-based tools like NaviLens, or even the rider app for HIRTA’s on-demand service, all require a certain level of digital literacy, which has led to education campaigns from transit officials.
“Sometimes the travel training is simply showing somebody how to use the app,” Schnathorst said. “We’re always willing to work with people that need that extra time, need that extra help.”
“One-on-one training is really key,” Alanna McKeeman, vice president and senior project manager at Foursquare ITP, which produced the June 2026 report Microtransit Solutions in Rural Communities, said during the webinar.
Even though urban and suburban transit systems — and their riders — have embraced tech such as tap-to-pay fare payment, account-based ticketing, smartphone-enabled trip-planning and other features of modern transit, rural services have been slower to adopt these technologies. Many riders still pay in cash when boarding the vehicle, and a majority do not use app-based booking.
“The average adoption rate of app-based booking was about 40 percent,” McKeeman said, citing the report. “Cash payment is still very common for rural microtransit.”
In addition to the branded app riders use to book rides across HIRTA’s 4,200-square-mile service area, the agency also operates a call-in line — which can often do what no app can.
“We do have quite a bit of callers who just want to talk to people,” Schnathorst said. “Social isolation is a major risk for all of us, but especially for older adults.”
