Working With Northwest Rescue: Hospital Referral Guide

How hospitals, nursing homes, and discharge planners work with Northwest Rescue for BLS, ALS, and Critical Care Transport across northern Illinois.

It's late on a Friday afternoon. A discharge planner has a patient cleared for rehab, a bed waiting across town and a family in the hallway asking when they can leave. What the planner needs is one phone call that gets the right ambulance there. This hospital and nursing home referral guide is written for that person, and for case managers, nursing home administrators and any facility staff who arrange medical transport in northern Illinois. If you are a family member trying to understand the transport your loved one is getting, our 911 vs. Interfacility Transport guide may be a better place to start.

Working with Northwest Rescue is meant to be simple. We are a licensed private EMS provider running BLS, ALS and Critical Care Transport out of our six stations across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We handle planned interfacility transports around the clock, along with hospital discharges, dialysis and treatment round-trips, event standby coverage, and emergency response backup when partner services need mutual aid.

What we handle for hospital and nursing home referrals

Hospital-to-hospital transfers move patients from a community hospital to a tertiary center for trauma, stroke, a cardiac cath lab or high-risk OB, including ICU-level Critical Care Transport for the sickest patients. We move patients from hospitals to nursing facilities for step-down and rehab admissions, and from nursing facilities to the hospital for admissions, ED visits and specialty consults. We also handle discharges home for patients who need stretcher transport with monitoring.

A lot of our week is recurring work: dialysis three times a week, wound care, oncology infusion and radiation therapy round-trips, plus diagnostic imaging trips for MRI, CT and cardiac studies at outpatient centers. We run bariatric transports with specialty equipment, and long-distance transports with clinical monitoring between northern Illinois and hospitals out of the region, including Milwaukee, Chicago, Peoria and across state lines. We also provide event standby medical coverage for community events, sporting events and corporate gatherings through our event coverage service.

For pediatric and neonatal specialty transports, we coordinate with the receiving children's hospital's dedicated transport team. Our Pediatric and Neonatal Transport guide explains how that works.

Choosing the right level of care

Basic Life Support (BLS) is for stable patients who need transport with basic monitoring, but no medications or advanced airway management on the way. A BLS ambulance is staffed by two EMTs. It fits most stable discharges, dialysis runs and outpatient appointments.

Advanced Life Support (ALS) is for patients who need IV access, medications or cardiac monitoring during transport, or who might. At least one paramedic is on board. It fits most interfacility transfers where the patient is on IV medications, has unstable vital signs or is moving to a higher level of care.

Critical Care Transport (CCT) is for ICU-level patients who need more than standard paramedic scope during the trip: ventilator management, several continuous IV drips (especially vasopressors), invasive monitoring or blood products. A Critical Care Paramedic or Critical Care Nurse rides with the patient, paired with a paramedic driver. It fits transfers to tertiary centers, post-cardiac-arrest patients and complex specialty moves.

If your patient falls somewhere between two levels, describe what is going on and our dispatch will help you decide. When in doubt, we would rather send more resources than fewer.

How to book a transport

Our dispatch line is staffed 24/7 for bookings and confirmations. A booking goes fastest when you have these details ready when you call:

Sending facility, unit and the clinician or case manager we should contact
Receiving facility and unit, and for interfacility transfers, the accepting physician or unit that confirmed the transfer
Patient name, date of birth, weight (for bariatric planning) and current clinical status
A short acuity summary: what is going on, what will be running during transport (IV drips, oxygen, ventilator settings) and any history the crew should know
Level of care needed (BLS, ALS or CCT), or a description of the patient if you are unsure
Requested pickup time for scheduled transfers (time-critical transfers are dispatched immediately)
Insurance information for billing
Anything special: infection precautions, a family member riding along, a bariatric stretcher, an isolation cart

For recurring transports like dialysis or standing appointments, ask dispatch about a standing transport agreement.

What happens after you book

Once the booking is confirmed, dispatch assigns a unit and crew based on the level of care, where the patient is and how sick they are, and sends them out with the transport details and the receiving facility's instructions. When the crew arrives, they call the sending unit and take report from the nurse or physician: medication list, IV lines, monitor settings and anything that has changed since you booked.

Packaging a higher-acuity patient for transport can take 30 to 60 minutes, between verifying lines, reconciling medications, setting up the ventilator on CCT transfers and talking with family. The drive itself goes at a speed that suits the patient's condition. Most interfacility transfers travel at normal highway speed, because hard braking is dangerous for an unstable patient.

At the receiving facility, the crew gives a bedside handoff to the receiving team covering the same medication list plus any changes or interventions on the way. The receiving facility signs off and the crew clears. Afterward, the patient care report goes to the sending and receiving facilities on request, and to our billing team for insurance.

Documentation to have ready at the bedside

The more complete the paperwork on the sending side, the sooner the crew is on the road with your patient. Have these ready:

Physician's transfer order with the reason for transfer, the level of care and the accepting physician's name
Face sheet and demographics
Current medication administration record and any active IV drip settings
Recent labs and imaging relevant to the transfer
Consent for transport signed by the patient or their healthcare decision-maker
Insurance card copies or insurance information
Advance directives, such as a DNR or POLST
An inventory of personal belongings traveling with the patient

For Critical Care Transport, also have the current ventilator settings (mode, PEEP, FiO2, tidal volume and rate), continuous drip concentrations and current rates, ABG results and vital sign trends from the last few hours, and any imaging or line placement confirmations that matter for the transfer.

Billing and insurance

Medicare, most commercial insurance plans and Illinois Medicaid cover medically necessary ambulance transport at the appropriate level. Our billing team works directly with insurers on medical necessity documentation, pre-authorization where it is required, and claims.

For planned interfacility transports, pre-authorization is often required, and the sending hospital's case management team usually handles it. We work with your case managers to get the right clinical documentation into the request. The same medical necessity documentation applies to non-emergency transports a facility arranges on a patient's behalf, like dialysis round-trips and appointments. Our billing team can help with coverage questions and, when needed, provide a cost estimate for the patient's family. For long-distance transports out of the region, coverage depends on the patient's plan and the details of the referral, so we give estimates in advance to help families and facility teams plan.

Why facilities choose us as a transport partner

We run all licensed levels of care (BLS, ALS and CCT), so you don't have to juggle vendors when a patient's condition changes. Dispatch runs 24/7, every day of the year, holidays included. We have established mutual aid relationships with municipal fire departments, other private services and air medical partners across northern Illinois, so if the right ambulance for your patient belongs to another agency, we can coordinate the handoff. We track on-time performance, feedback from sending units and handoff quality at receiving units as core operating measures.

We are also locally owned. Northwest Rescue is owned and operated in northern Illinois, and our leadership answers the phone. When something needs to be escalated, you talk to someone who lives and works in the region you serve.

If your facility hasn't worked with us before, reach out through our contact page or directly to our operations team to set up an intake conversation. We will go over your typical transport volume, common referral patterns, any recurring standing orders and how you prefer to communicate. For high-volume partners, we can set up a dedicated point of contact and a simpler booking workflow.

Frequently asked questions

Do you provide non-emergency medical transport?

Yes. Non-emergency medical transport is a large part of what we do, including dialysis round-trips, outpatient appointments, hospital discharges and diagnostic imaging trips. The level of care matches the patient: BLS for stable patients, ALS for patients on IV medications or with unstable vital signs, and Critical Care Transport for ICU-level patients.

What happens if insurance denies a claim?

If insurance denies a claim and leaves a balance, we work with the family directly on a payment plan. Facility staff can send any billing questions from families straight to our billing team. Cost estimates for transports that are not covered or are out of network are available in advance on request, so nobody is surprised after the fact.

Do you coordinate with air medical services?

Yes. When a patient is time-critical and helicopter or fixed-wing transport is clinically appropriate, we coordinate with regional air medical services (Flight for Life, LifeLine and others, depending on the mission) to hand care from our ground crew to the flight team. That coordination happens dispatch to dispatch.

Related reading

Interested in becoming a Northwest Rescue referral partner? We work with hospitals, nursing facilities, dialysis centers and specialty clinics across northern Illinois. Contact our operations team to set up an intake conversation.