What Is Uber Health?: Uber Launches Ride Hailing Service For Healthcare Providers
Uber announced Thursday the launch of Uber Health, a new platform that will provide the company’s standard ride hailing service specifically to healthcare providers in order to organize rides for patients and clients.
Uber Health aims to cut into the market for non-emergency medical transportation by offering more affordable rides that can be hailed immediately, within a few hours or with up to 30 days in advance. The service also doesn’t require the rider to have the Uber app or a smartphone.
Two versions of Uber Health will be made available by the company. The first is an online dashboard, and the second is an application program interface (API) that can be integrated into existing health care tools.
Uber Health won’t require the Uber app, as information about the ride can be delivered via SMS text message—opening the service up to even standard feature phone users. In the future, Uber intends to expand the service to allow people with only a landline connect to be able to get trip details.
At launch, Uber Health will work with more than 100 health care providers across the United States.
The launch of Uber Health marks the ride hailing company’s first foray into the world of non-emergency medical transportation—a market that generates more than $3 billion per year, according to the Transit Cooperative Research Program .
Many of the rides are provided to people who can’t drive—either because of age, poverty or medical condition—and Medicare and Medicaid providers cover at least some of the cost of transportation.
In addition to cutting into the cost of the standard ride, Uber’s program will also aim to cut back on the number of people who have their healthcare access limited by a lack of transportation. According to JAMA Internal Medicine, about 3.6 million Americans miss health care appointments every year because of issues with transportation.
Those missed appointments have a much larger cost for patients in the long term, as failure to receive care can result in much more severe—and more expensive—services down the road, including emergency room trips and extended hospital stays. The cost of missed appointments is estimated to be $150 billion per year in the U.S., according to industry experts.
Uber Health also has some obstacles in front of it that standard Uber rides don’t present. While Uber generally collects data about its users, its Uber Health service will require it be much more careful about rider information.
The platform will store all trip information in a client-side, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant server in order to assure patient privacy. The data will never be stored on Uber’s own servers, according to the company.
Uber has a less-than-stellar record when it comes to user data; the company suffered a massive breach in 2016 and covered it up for more than a year, leaving more than 50 million riders and drivers in the dark about the fact that their data was accessed by an unauthorized source. It will have to overcome the stigma of that incident in order to gain trust for its new service.
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