Uber, Lyft are smartphone, internet, natives.
And yet both these San Francisco-based companies, sensing an untapped opportunity in the healthcare market, are also targeting patients that may not own a smartphone and/or those who are not Uber and Lyft riders.
In late September, Circulation, a Boston-based company launched a digital transportation technology platform from that integrates with healthcare systems and Uber’s API indicated to help non-emergency medical transportation for patients. Circulation will manage this new service and has been chosen as the Uber’s preferred healthcare platform partner. The company is co-founded by John Brownstein, professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The program will be piloted at Boston Children’s Hospital, Mercy Health System’s three acute-care hospitals and all-inclusive care program for seniors in Pennsylvania, as well as Nemours Children’s Health System in Wilmington, Delaware. The service is set to roll out across six additional states this year.
Here’s how it works: Circulation verifies patient health insurance and ride eligibility, and enables hospitals to schedule and manage transportation taking into account patients’ preferences. The platform allows scheduling to be done in advance. Further, the service is cognizant of patient’s physical needs as well and asks if patients require wheelchair assistance or help getting in or out of a vehicle, if they are hearing or vision impaired and travel with a caregiver. Answers to these questions help to determine the best vehicle selection.
Circulation seems to be a natural (and more of dedicated healthcare) foray from a separate announcement in July, when the San Francisco ride share company launched UberCENTRAL.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“With UberCENTRAL, it’s a business focused product that allows you to book rides on behalf of people and cover the costs of that ride and they do not need to have a Uber account and they do not need to have smartphones,” explained Sarah Maxwell, who leads product communications for the healthcare business, in an interview in August.
For instance, say a patient came in for dialysis treatment and when he/she is ready to leave and is setting up the next appointment, the person at the front desk can inquire about transportation needs.
“In that same conversation, they can say, ‘Would you like a ride home?’ We can cover the costs and they could do that right there in that setting and two minutes later, three minutes later, your Uber arrives,” Maxwell said.
Uber is aggressively pushing into this space, but Lyft, its prime competitor, has been working to serve non-smartphone patients for a while. In fact, the company’s efforts were noted in a prime medical journal, the benchmark by which many in the clinical community view novel products.
“For the past year we have been moving patients to/from the doctors without a smartphone,” said Gyre Renwick, vice president and head of enterprise healthcare sales at Lyft in an email forwarded by a company representative. “The success of our work to-date was recently documented in the Journal of American Medical Association.”
Indeed that study found that a pilot program by a West Coast managed care delivery system — CareMore Health Plan — successfully reduced costs and improved wait times for seniors with chronic conditions by partnering with Lyft for non-emergency medical transportation.
More specifically, CareMore Health Plan, a subsidiary of Anthem, showed that its collaboration with Lyft led to a reduction in patient wait times by 30 percent (12.5 minutes to 8.7 minutes) and cut per-ride costs by 32.4 percent ($31.54 to $21.32). The study was based on 479 CareMore member rides in May and June. Not surprisingly, patient satisfaction rates was sky-high: more than 80 percent.
Lyft has two sets of customers: patients who are going for their routine appointment and secondly, healthcare organizations aiming to lower the overall cost of care transportation.
