On-demand transport businesses Lyft and Uber are moving more aggressively into the healthcare sector. Lyft Business, Lyft’s enterprise division, has been partnering with digital health startups trying to make non-emergency medical transportation service smoother.
A new partnership with Allscripts will help Lyft further integrate its service into electronic health records so that booking the car service can be a seamless part of making healthcare appointments. It also extends the company’s service to 45,000 physician practices, 180,000 physicians and 2,500 hospitals that use Allscripts EHR, according to an emailed company statement.
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Lyft Business Vice President Gyre Renwick, a Google veteran, said its deal with Allscripts will help to integrate its services with hospitals and physician practices to impact healthcare costs.
“Over the next two years, we believe we can cut in half the 3.65 million Americans missing medical appointments due to transportation issues,” he said.
Renwick said the company contracts with the largest NEMT brokers which can provide a variety of medical vehicles depending on the needs of patients. They can help those with mobility issues and other needs.
As an example of where Lyft can make a substantial difference in healthcare costs, Renwick points to patients who need to receive dialysis. For these patients, in particular, the consequences of missing an appointment can mean hospitalization. Lyft’s own fleet of drivers focuses on ambulatory services for able-bodied people. Between Lyft and the NEMT brokers, its services could lead to reduced medical costs and enhanced care.
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Since Lyft Business rolled out its Lyft Concierge API last year, Lyft has developed partnerships with Circulation, RoundTrip, LogistiCare, National MedTrans, the NEMT provider for CareMore, and American Medical Response. Hitch Health also integrates with Lyft as well as with EHR vendors such as Epic Systems and athenahealth.
A study published in JAMA reviewed 479 CareMore member rides in May and June 2016. It showed that Lyft’s NEMT service reduced patient waiting times by 30 percent to 8.7 minutes and cut per-ride costs by 32.4 percent to $21.32.
“The value of what we can do with Allscripts is [providers using their EHR] can request transport service across their system. Health systems also look at this as a way to handle patients they discharge.”
Prior to joining Lyft in 2016, Renwick worked on healthcare initiatives at Google. One involved partnering with Mayo Clinic to refine healthcare searches on the search engine. The view that healthcare information needs to be presented in a better and more accurate manner motivated the initiative. Another involved using self-driving cars to ferry visually impaired patients to medical appointments. The development of self-driving cars is an area that both Lyft and Uber have expressed interest in. It could offer an interesting wrinkle to Lyft’s NEMT ambitions in the future.
Perhaps Renwick will share more of the company’s ambitions when he takes part in a panel discussion on NEMT at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas this week. It is one of a handful of discussions that will be available to watch on Facebook Live