Uber Health is hitting the gas on bringing healthcare to patients.
The nonemergent medical transportation market is rapidly growing, driven by need from older patients as well as patients with disabilities and chronic conditions. In fact, it’s predicted to hit more than $15.6 billion by 2028, according to a November report from private equity research firm Insight Partners. For comparison, the market was worth $10 billion in 2023.
Uber Health is contributing to this growth by driving patients to appointments and providing delivery services.
Through its B2B platform, the company works with providers and nonemergent medical transport brokers, like Modivcare, to integrate Uber Health’s services into their offerings. It also offers over-the-counter medication, prescription, and grocery delivery to patients’ homes. These services are paid for by health plans, Flex cards, or through the provider itself, according to Zach Clark, global general manager at Uber Health.
Clark sat down with Healthcare Brew during this year’s CES to discuss Uber Health’s mission and long-term goals.
These answers have been edited for length and clarity.
When you started the company in 2018, what did you set out to do? How has that shifted over time?
We set out to provide vaccinations in inner city communities and enable nurses to get to those communities safely and effectively. We were initially predominantly focused on providers. So like, how do you support a provider directly, whether that’s a hospital or an individual clinic? What it’s evolved [into] today is much more multifactor. We spend an enormous amount of time within the benefit designs in Medicaid and Medicare Advantage plans. We’re the underlying network that’s powering many rides every day for those beneficiaries, whether they’re in a federal government program or they’re in a state Medicaid program. The shift has been the opportunity to deploy our networks in states where we’re allowed to operate from a Medicaid perspective and then to bring that level of access to those programs.
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What are your long-term goals for Uber Health?
One of them is to ensure that we continue to drive access across states or jurisdictions that we’re not allowed to operate in. There’s still many states that don’t allow rideshare as part of their Medicaid programs, and from a cost, reliability, and access perspective, that’s a really challenging reality.
The second part of that story is really focused on, how do we take the best parts of Uber consumer experience and deploy that into healthcare in a way that simplifies access for the patient? The world that we’re building and the world that I envision, you’ll know benefits that your health plan offers by nature of being an Uber user, and you’ll be able to access those seamlessly and get reimbursed for those services in a way that won’t make homework for the patient...To give you an example, if I’m a 67-year-old senior and I’m a Humana member [who] needs a ride to the doctor…we’re seamlessly managing the reimbursement on the backend so that the patient doesn’t necessarily feel anything different, but they’re made aware of their benefit through our experience.
I know the company delivers food and medications to patients, but does Uber Health work in home healthcare?
We are delivering nurses to homes [where they care for patients]. We do a lot of work supporting frontline nurses. One of the things that’s really interesting about that is that it’s both quality of life and an efficiency play for that nurse. Not only can he or she actually do work in the back of the vehicle, but if I’m in an urban setting, for instance, I’m not worried about parking, I’m not worried about tolls, I’m not worried about the administration of those things. I am quickly engaging around what I’m there to do without all the administrative friction that occurs when you’re driving a vehicle.