For the past two years, CareMore Health, a division of health insurer Anthem, has worked with rideshare company Lyft to provide non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) to its patients.
CareMore detailed Lyft’s ability to improve patient experience and lower costs in a recent article published in Health Affairs.
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Traditionally, NEMT was provided through a series of specialized transportation brokers, which have often seen low customer patient satisfaction, long wait times, as well as issues with fraud and abuse.
Lyft has pitched their service as faster, cheaper and more transparent way to provide transportation for the healthcare industry, developing partnerships with Circulation, RoundTrip, LogistiCare, National MedTrans and American Medical Response. Hitch Health also integrates with Lyft as well as with EHR vendors such as Epic Systems and athenahealth.
After an initial two-month pilot in 2016 with Lyft garnered promising results, CareMore’s partnership grew throughout 2017 to 7,000 rides per month, accounting for 91 percent of the company’s curb-to-curb NEMT rides.
“When we have an idea that works we always take the time to actually try to drive it into practice,” said CareMore Health CEO Sachin Jain in a phone interview. “The whole world is changing and everyone is using ride sharing, but the healthcare industry was stuck and using traditional non-emergency medical transportation with brokers.”
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Other major findings from CareMore’s Lyft partnership included:
- On time rides – which showed up within 20 minutes of the scheduled pick-up – was 92 percent with Lyft, compared to 74 pecent with non-Lyft rides
- Wait times with Lyft were 45 percent lower than alternatives
- A survey of CareMore patients using Lyft-based rides found that 98 percent reported being “satisfied or “very satisfied” with the experience
- Lyft rides cost 39 percent less, on average, compared to non-Lyft rides
The cost savings – which Jain described as “in the millions” – allowed CareMore to expand its transportation benefits and offer 28,000 more rides at no additional cost to the health plan.
One important thing to note is that while Lyft and competitors like Uber have touted their ability to reduce missed appointments, research has not yet backed those claims up.
CareMore is an integrated health plan that serves more than 100,000 patients, predominantly high-risk Medicare, Medicaid and dual-eligible members.
Integrating Lyft’s services then, wasn’t just a matter of downloading an app, especially since a good chunk of CareMore’s patients do not own a smartphone.
Instead, the company created a patient and senior-centered approach, enlisting their transportation team to request rides on behalf of the patient and coordinate between patient and driver. CareMore also held training sessions for local drivers and created special pickup locations around their care centers.
CareMore has also used Lyft’s services to support some of their other innovative initiatives around loneliness and social isolation, which research has shown can be as detrimental to patient health as smoking.
Patients can use Lyft rides to travel to the organization’s care centers which also offers fitness and well-being classes that function both to make patients healthier as well as create a social community for CareMore members.
“I think we take transportation for granted. As soon as you’re unable to actually get around, you really start to see the value of it,” Jain said. ” I think in the frail and vulnerable population we serve, transportation is one of those barriers, one of those significant social determinants of health.”
Pictured: Getty Images
