By Paige Minemyer | Jan 13, 2020 9:00am
Sutter Health and Lyft are teaming up to allow the health
system’s facilities to roll out individualized transportation services for both
patients and staff members.
The partnership would offer, for example, a rural clinic the
option to assist patients with rides to and from appointments or cover
transport to and from public transit to help workers avoid parking fees in
urban areas, the two companies announced Monday.
The individualized approach allows for a variety of point
solutions that can meet very specific needs of a specific region, Megan
Callahan, vice president of healthcare at Lyft,
told FierceHealthcare.
“It puts the power
in the hands of those Sutter teams to define what transportation programs
are necessary,” Callahan said.
Both Lyft and its main competitor Uber have made a strong push into
the healthcare space, bolstered by data that suggest patients are already using
these platforms regularly to get to doctors' appointments and other
nonemergency care.
Amid talk in the industry of addressing the social determinants
of care, ride-sharing platforms offer an opportunity to
tackle transportation—a key one. Research shows that access to ride-shares
can reduce wait times for care and reduce costs by
improving access.
Another potential option Sutter will offer is using Lyft to
transport home health workers to patient visits. Callahan said this
could allow clinicians a more efficient use of their time as they could
prepare for visits or debrief during the drive.
“We really viewed that as Lyft helping them maximize
their clinician resources,” Callahan said.
Sutter, a sprawling California health system that runs 24
hospitals and other facilities across 20 counties, was one of the first
providers to see the potential in how Lyft could benefit healthcare and has
piloted its services in a number of ways over the past several
years, Callahan said.
For example, patients in the emergency
department at Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center
Pacific campus in San Francisco were offered a ride via Lyft to a location of
their choice. In the span of three months, offering Lyft rides reduced wait
times from 23 minutes to three minutes, according to the announcement.
In addition, the pilot saved the hospital 25% on its
transportation costs compared to its previous solutions, such as taxi
vouchers.
“We worked with their staff and really helped train them,”
Callahan said. “They actually had a lot of good input in how we should do our
product development in that particular setting.”
In another pilot at Sutter’s Palo Alto Medical Foundation, staff
members were able to move more efficiently between care centers, Lyft
said.
Callahan said that Sutter isn’t the only provider that’s
interested in how the ride-share platform’s services could be used to benefit
employees and improve workflows. She said that the successes with Sutter could
demonstrate use cases for Lyft’s platforms health systems may not have
considered—and offer a road map if they want to test something
themselves.
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