Jitterbug phones give seniors a Lyft
GreatCall, a San Diego company that makes simplified cell phones for seniors, is piloting a way for its customers to summon Lyft rides by pressing 0 on its phones, which are called Jitterbugs, to verbally request a ride from its operators.
“Transportation is one of the main challenges for seniors who are trying to stay active and independent,” said David Inns, CEO of GreatCall, which makes a range of technologies and services for older consumers, including devices for emergency response, tracking fitness, and remembering medication schedules. “We decided the next service we wanted to add was to let customers nationwide get reliable, affordable transportation.”
GreatCall is testing the service in California, Florida, Arizona, Chicago and Dallas, with plans to expand further. Rides can be called on demand or scheduled up to a week ahead of time.
Customers, who will get fare estimates in advance, will pay the standard Lyft rates plus a GreatCall surcharge. For a $10 to $15 ride, the surcharge is $2, while it’s $5 for a $30 ride, Inns said. Charges will be added onto the phone user’s monthly bill. GreatCall is taking $5 off the first ride.
Even while on-demand services and the smartphones proliferate, a significant number of people, especially seniors, lack a way to summon them. A third of U.S. adults and 70 percent of people aged 65 and older don’t have a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s created an opening for companies to cater to people with more basic phones.
The GreatCall/Lyft concept is similar to a hotline developed by Mountain View startup GoGoGrandparent that provides a toll-free hotline to seniors to call to request an Uber ride. But while GoGoGrandparent is a new company whose founders handle most calls themselves, GreatCall is a 10-year-old company with 900,000 users, more than half of whom use its Jitterbug Flip phone and its Jitterbug Smart, a smartphone with a larger display and fewer buttons than a typical smartphone. It has more than 800 call-center operators, who already help customers with a variety of tasks 24/7, such as setting up their phones, Inns said.
GreatCall is using a year-old Lyft product called Concierge, which allows entities such as hospitals and companies to arrange rides on behalf of others, including scheduled rides. The passengers don’t need to have smartphones; the entity requesting the ride is billed by Lyft and can pass along the cost to the rider.
Some 3.6 million Americans a year miss or delay medical care because they lack transportation, according to the Community Transportation Association. That explains why Concierge has seen a lot of use in the medical field, said Gyre Renwick, Lyft head of health care and enterprise partnerships.
“For example, when someone is discharged from a hospital ER, there is a bottleneck of helping them get back home,” he said. “Hospitals can use Concierge to call Lyft on behalf of the patient.”
Concierge customers include San Rafael’s Whistlestop and the Marin Senior Coordinating Council, which recently starting integrating Lyft rides along with its Whistlestop vans to get seniors to appointments. National Medtrans Network, a medical transport service, uses Concierge to arrange Lyft rides to non-emergency medical appointments in New York.
The partnership with GreatCall, like other Concierge arrangements with senior and healthcare providers, “aligns well with our mission of improving transportation for individual members and communities,“Renwick said.