Last week, Uber announced it was rolling out a service aimed at helping healthcare providers summon rides for patients. Now it’s Lyft’s turn to up the ante.
Lyft announced March 5 that it is expanding its partnerships with healthcare providers to provide the ride-hailing service to doctors and hospitals who want to arrange transportation for patients who can’t get to appointments.
Lyft is teaming with Allscripts, one of the nation’s electronic health records companies, to integrate its platform into the daily routines of 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 physician practices, and 180,000 physicians, reaching an estimated 7 million patients.
A desktop application allows medical facilities to call multiple cars at once, and sends patients ride details via text messages. Healthcare providers cover the cost of the ride unless otherwise specified.
Although Lyft remains in the backseat when compared to its larger rival Uber, the company has spent the past two years working with hundreds of healthcare organizations through its business-focused Lyft Concierge platform.
“The idea is here simply to give healthcare providers the ability to call a ride for a patient by pushing a button inside systems they already use,” David Baga, Lyft’s chief business officer, told USA TODAY.
Baga says Lyft is working not only with physicians but also “regulators, transportation brokers, and tech partners, because it isn’t just about a healthcare provider deciding you need a Lyft, there are insurers and others involved determining your care eligibility.”
Uber Health, which has been in a testing phase with 100 healthcare organizations since July, allows doctors to call multiple rides for patients using a desktop interface with Uber’s platform. Doctors and hospitals pay for the rides.
For physicians, ride hailing represents a more efficient and cheaper option to taxis and shuttles—but notably, not ambulances. Making sure patients make appointments is good for their well-being, but it also saves hospitals money and improves their ratings, physicians testing these services and health-care analysts say.
Nationally, missed appointments cost healthcare providers $150 billion a year, with no-show rates as high as 30%, according to SCI Solutions, which provides IT services to the healthcare industry.
These ride-hailing moves into healthcare seem altruistic and solid public relations coup. Who doesn’t like helping sick people in need? But here’s what’s going on.
The business model for ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft still doesn’t pencil out. Paying the driver eats up a lot of potential profit, which is why both are going gung-ho on self-driving cars.
But until autonomous cars dawn, both tech startups can improve their bottom line through scale, which is why they’re aggressively pursuing doctors and hospitals as a source of new customers.
Baga says that the company’s work with healthcare providers over the past years has already yielded efficiency improvements.
Other Lyft partners include LogistiCare, a service that coordinates transportation to non-emergency medical appointments, and Hitch Health, a Minnesota-based non-emergency healthcare transportation company that uses a healthcare provider’s electronic health records to identify patients who may benefit from a free ride, and automatically sends patients SMS texts with details.
