By SCBIZ Staff

MULLINS – Seventy new jobs have been created for South Carolina residents through contracts with Atlanta-based LogistiCare, which will manage four regions of South Carolina’s Medicaid non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT).

LogistiCare announced is has established a state-of-the-art call center in Mullins that employees 52 local residents. The remaining jobs are split among three regional offices in Columbia, North Charleston and North Augusta. The call center receives about 2,300 reservation calls every day and is projected to schedule about 1.4 million trips annually.

“LogistiCare is very pleased to have been selected to manage this portion of South Carolina’s NEMT program,” said John Shermyen, CEO of LogistiCare. “As we do in every one of our new state operations, we hired our South Carolina employees from local communities. Being able to positively impact the local economy by creating new jobs was very important to us.”

In its four South Carolina regions, LogistiCare manages transportation for about 600,000 eligible Medicaid recipients. Statewide South Carolina has 992,000 eligible Medicaid beneficiaries.

The five-year contracts took effect May 1 and run through February 2012, inclusive of renewal options.

LogistiCare manages a national network of more than 1,200 transportation companies that provide more than 13 million trips to customers annually. LogistiCare’s clients include state Medicaid agencies, school boards, transit authorities, hospital systems and many of the nation's largest managed-care organizations.