What You Should Know:
- Uber Health, Uber’s healthcare arm, today announced it will soon add grocery and over the counter (OTC) item delivery to its centralized HIPAA-enabled platform. Payers and providers nationwide will soon be able to use the same platform they already use for non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) and prescription delivery to have groceries and OTC items delivered directly to patient homes, facilitated by Uber Eats.
- The first-of-its-kind platform will simplify and enhance the entire patient journey—from getting to a primary care appointment to accessing critical prescriptions and groceries.
Re-Imagining the Logistics of Healthcare by Enabling Access to Transportation
Value-based care and population health programs have the potential to radically improve our healthcare system. But the administrative complexity associated with this care, particularly the utilization of supplemental benefits, is one of the industry’s biggest challenges. Providers and payers, including Medicare and Medicaid, lack the visibility and infrastructure to execute on these programs effectively. As a result, patients—many of whom belong to underserved or vulnerable populations—are often saddled with “homework.” This means they are forced to coordinate their own transportation to and from appointments, and to find a way to access critical prescriptions and healthy food.
Uber Health’s platform is designed to address these pain points. By facilitating seamless connectivity across the continuum of care, Uber Health is enabling the industry-wide migration towards value-based care to help improve patient experiences and outcomes while reducing costs.
“Value-based care is the future of healthcare, but it’s complex and labor-intensive to deliver and scale. Uber Health addresses this challenge head-on,” said Caitlin Donovan, Global Head of Uber Health. “Our platform streamlines coordination across multiple benefits—non-emergency medical transportation, prescription delivery, and food and over-the-counter medication delivery, empowering payers and providers to support patients beyond the four walls of a medical office. And, because our platform is built on the largest mobility network in the world, we’re uniquely capable of meeting these needs and unlocking the potential of value-based care at scale.”
The Uber Health platform—which was designed and built by healthcare experts with decades of experience—uniquely enables visibility and streamlined benefit coordination between payers and providers. Soon, providers will have access to patient benefit data and eligibility files from payers, allowing them to leverage existing benefit structures and confidently deploy services that can be covered by insurance. This is a first-of-its-kind solution, aiming to drastically increase convenience, empower providers to execute on more holistic and effective patient care, and increase member satisfaction and retention.
Using Uber’s Expansive Network to Unlock the Benefits of ‘Food as Medicine’ Nationwide
As food as medicine programs increase in prevalence and yield promising early results, Uber Health’s expansion into grocery and OTC item delivery provides healthcare organizations with yet another powerful lever to enhance the patient experience, improve health outcomes, and fully “close the loop” on patient care. This is especially necessary for homebound patients and those who live in areas—like food deserts—where accessing groceries can be particularly challenging.
Payers and providers nationwide will soon be able to use the Uber Health platform to have groceries and OTC items delivered directly to patient homes. When ordering, coordinators can customize programs to patients’ specific health needs, giving them the tools, they need to lead healthier lives and enhancing the overall patient experience. Uber Health’s grocery and OTC delivery offering taps into Uber’s existing infrastructure and nationwide community of grocery and convenience merchants, unlocking the value of food as medicine at national scale.
Food as medicine programs are critical for effectively managing preventative and chronic care, and can ultimately reduce acute incidents, minimize costs across the healthcare system, and drive better health outcomes. One study on healthy meal delivery found that nationwide implementation could eliminate 1.6 million hospitalizations annually, resulting in a cost-savings of $13.6 billion a year for payers. A similar study found that patients with access to healthy meals cost the healthcare system 16% less than patients that did not have access.
