Uber, Lyft tout new medical side-hustle

Services aim to curb appointment no-shows

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s no good having health care if you can’t make the appointment. For house-bound patients, the answer may increasingly be an Uber or Lyft — rather than a medical-transport van or taxi.

Both companies are pushing hard into the health care transportation space in order to add scale to their operations while helping providers improve their level of care.

Hospitals and doctors are flocking to the alternative for the same reason millions of individuals have tapped on an app to call a ride: It’s a cheap, doorto-door option you can track at a glance.

The move is one more way the ridehailing companies, which rely on fleets of independent contractors, are cutting into established transportation routes and the businesses that have served them, an impact city residents and leaders are only beginning to understand.

Last week, Uber Health went live after an eight-month trial with 100 health care providers that tested the ride-hailing service as a way to ensure eligible patients weren’t no-shows for appointments.

Rival Lyft on Monday built on a twoyear effort to offer doctors its platform with a partnership with medical records company Allscripts that adds an estimated 7 million patients via 2,500 hospitals and 180,000 physicians.

Nationally, missed appointments cost health care providers $150 billion a year, with no-show rates as high as 30%, according to SCI Solutions, which provides IT services to the health care industry.

“Obviously helping patients is a good thing, but there are also financial ramifications of making sure your level of care is consistent,” said Gartner analyst Tom Handler. “If you get penalized (for not following up with patients), there’s incentive for you to track them better, and sometimes that means helping them get to you.”

With both Uber and Lyft, health care providers use a custom desktop platform that allows them to schedule multiple rides at once. Providers determine who is eligible based on need, and costs are covered by providers and sometimes defrayed by insurance.

In some cases, hospitals and doctors may get a higher insurance reimbursement rate for a low level of readmissions, an incentive to make it easier for patients to make their follow-up appointments.

“I’d say 70% of the time we’re using Uber is to make sure that a patient that’s been discharged makes it back for a critical follow-up visit,” said Chris Needham, director of Member Health and Wellness at Renown Health, which serves urban and rural patients in northern Nevada.

Needham said that in the past, deserving patients — ranging from the indigent to seniors with dementia — were accommodated with taxis, “but that would require us to hand them a voucher in person, so this (ride hailing) is much more efficient.”

But these new services are limited. Uber and Lyft rides won’t work for disabled individuals. Last week, Disability Rights Advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against Uber, challenging its lack of transportation for those in wheelchairs.

GENE PUSKAR/AP