Mercy Medical Angels

Mercy Medical Angels removes the barrier to medical care with transportation on the ground and in the air. Our goal is to ensure no one in need of medical care is denied because they don't have transportation. Trips are for patient and caregiver travel for the specific purpose of a specialist physician appointment or specialized hospital admittance. The appointment is made necessary by the nature of the disease, disorder, wound or necessity to use a specific remote facility for special procedural. The health care system in the United States stresses the necessity of patients having appropriate access to necessary healthcare services. They rarely recognize the long-distance travel component essential in many cases, but this is the need being addressed by Mercy Medical Angels. Mercy Medical Angels ensures that patients have access to medical care that they need; which is the result and outcome of all Mercy Medical Angels programs.

Each trip is an "only means" of access to the specialized physician or medical facility or specific clinical trial in which the patient is enrolled. Very often the medical procedure or intervention represents the only hope for a cure and ongoing life from a usually fatal diagnosis. Mercy Medical Angels verifies and validates the determination and specialist appointment before arranging transportation. Mercy Medical Angels likewise verifies the patient family financial need; i.e., patient inability to meet the cost of private or commercial long-distance transportation.

We offer the most cost-effective means of charitable transportation for each patient, based on the distance they need to travel, their medical requirements, the location they need to reach, and the availability of different modes of travel as related to their specific departure and destination requirements.

Our strategy is to make sure each means of transportation, whether it is a private aircraft flight, an airline flight or a trip via ground transportation, is delivered to the patient with the least overall cash cost to Mercy Medical Angels . We work hard to drive down overhead costs related to each trip and to develop partnerships with corporations or commercial transportation providers or volunteer donor pilots that sponsor Mercy Medical Angels or offer discounts for purchased travel for Mercy Medical Angels patient clients.

Our experience in providing charitable, long-distance medical transportation goes back to our small, informal beginnings in 1972 when all transports were done using volunteer pilots flying their own privately-owned aircraft. These pilots wanted to fill a need in their communities. Over the years we have learned and expanded to meet new needs and offer different forms or modes of transportation. Through it all we have never compromised our highest standards of operational integrity, transportation safety, operational efficiency, public transparency and accountability, The safety record through all these years of continuous service has been perfect.

The Mercy Medical Angels program became a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 1984 and is governed by a respected Board of Directors.

Because of our commitment to public transparency, the home page of our website provides on-call real time data counts for trips completed (not just coordinated).

The task we have set out for ourselves is not one that will ever be fully completed; the ongoing need is too great for that. We continue, however, to make an increasingly larger impact. In 2000, we provided 9,760 patient transports ... just three years later we provided 21,524. In the first nine months of 2015, we provided 5,267 trips. In fiscal year 2021 27,561 trips were provided on the ground and in the air.

We've been able to manage this increase by finding more innovative ways of helping clients. We have evolved from only offering high-cost (to the donors) volunteer pilot flights to donated frequent flier miles on airlines, to now purchasing bus and train tickets, gas cards and even directly purchasing gas for mobile clinics so that patients can be served closer to home.