Recently, Vince Kuraitis and Dr. Randy Williams sat down with Caitlin Donovan, the Global Head of Uber Health, and Dr. Michael Cantor, the Chief Medical Officer of Uber Health, to learn more about Uber’s healthcare arm.

The interview is covered in two blog posts. In Part I, you will learn 1) how Uber Health functions and how it supports the care of populations, and 2) how Uber Health harnesses network effects.

Continue reading to understand how Uber Health is so much more than a transportation platform!

Meet Uber Health

Vince Kuraitis:

Our first question–simply describe Uber Health. What is it, who do you serve, and what are the various value propositions?

Caitlin Donovan:

I’m hoping that most of your readers know and use Uber. Think of Uber as the app that’s on your phone, in your pocket that allows you to request a ride somewhere or a delivery of something to you. Uber Health builds on those core competencies of Uber–the ability to move people, places and things–but takes an approach that allows us to think of many folks in the population as opposed to individuals requesting on their own behalf.

Instead of being an app on your phone, we’re actually a software platform that is web-based or API driven, that allows care coordinators broadly to request things on behalf of their patients. Now we’ve purposely built our platform to streamline the coordination for care coordinators that serve many patient populations at a time. These patients tend to be part of more vulnerable populations that often don’t have the ability to request these services on their own behalf – making them more reliant on their care coordinators and care team.

The types of care coordinators that tend to use our platform tend to be benefit managers. There’s a well-established transportation benefit in the Medicaid and Medicare space and increasingly in employer-sponsored plans as well. These benefit managers have had Uber Health embedded into their systems’ provider groups. If you think about a discharge planner that’s thinking about how to get a patient home after an inpatient stay, you need to think about how you move the patient home, how you get them back to their follow-up appointment, how you deliver their prescriptions and the food they need. That’s where Uber Health comes in.

We also work more generally with health plans, like Medicare Advantage, that offer a suite of ancillary benefits across transportation, food delivery, over-the-counter delivery, and prescription delivery. Through strategic partnerships, we’ve been able to embed into those benefit groups to be administered across their provider networks, in their call centers, in their value-based care providers which allows us to more seamlessly tap into those ancillary services to help serve those patients broadly.

Michael Cantor:

I think the beauty of it is we’re all familiar, like Caitlin said, with Uber and hopefully use it all the time. And we also know that Uber, when you go on the app now, is no longer just for rides – you can order food, you can order groceries. Uber Eats is truly integrated into the Uber platform. It’s one contiguous technology. It’s one software. And even the ride options are more varied –  it could be a scooter, it could be a bike, it could be a car, it could be a van, it could be all kinds of different transportation modalities. This is key when we look at the ways Uber Health can harness the capabilities of Uber to address mobility access challenges across the healthcare space.

That said, the reality is in healthcare we face special barriers. There are special rules about how healthcare gets paid for that affect things like who’s going to pay for the ride for the person to get home, or the person who’s on dialysis, or on chemotherapy–and who needs frequent rides to and from a healthcare setting. Those are paid for under very special circumstances, only for certain people, only for providers who are in-network.

Our team is built with people from all different backgrounds – experienced healthcare providers, and technology innovators. We are able to bring all this knowledge together to look at how to deploy Uber’s technologies to meet and overcome the barriers that healthcare often puts in the way between people and good care – and we can do it with the realities of the healthcare industry in mind.

Randy Williams:

I think this is really great to hear. It meets a whole ton of needs. I think we all recognize that there’s so much that goes on, as you said, beyond the four walls of a clinical encounter that needs to be coordinated, that needs to be given user-friendly accessibility.

How Uber Health Harnesses Network Effects

Vince Kuraitis:

I’d like to ask you a little bit about where you see network effects at a couple of different levels. First within Uber Health, and when we say network effects, it’s a pretty simple concept. It’s the idea of users getting more value as more users join the network or more services are available on the network. They may be identical users or it may be complimentary services that become available on the network.

What types of network effects do you have today and what might you be thinking about in the future? My characterization–if you want to add to it or subtract to it—is that you’re building not only a network but really a network of networks.

Caitlin Donovan:

I think you’re spot on – we’re building a network of networks. We have the capabilities to be the technology glue that allows the constituents of the healthcare ecosystem to tap into ancillary benefit offerings. From transportation, prescription delivery, food delivery, and over-the-counter medication delivery, we can connect with specialists to enable higher levels of service.

This also means there’s a lot of value here because the more users of our platform, the more folks want to join the network. So there’s a natural network effect there. I think most clinicians want to practice whole patient care, but the way the system works today makes that incredibly hard. At a large national payer for example, you have to go to 17 different vendors to successfully tap into all of the ancillary benefits they have available. Just combining that into a single platform, it makes it so much more user-friendly and so much more likely that a provider will be able to navigate for a patient – and that a patient will get the care they need.

It’s also beneficial to health plans – which will be able to offer more benefits because they’re not paying an administrative expense 17 different times. The one thing that I worry about too is making sure that not just the availability of the network and the technology allows you greater access, but that we’re able to follow through on benefit design, contract structure, value-based care design to ensure that incentives are all aligned across the entire care journey.

Michael Cantor:

As we’ve gotten into this network of networks and trying to figure out how to make it work, we keep running into challenging situations because the benefit design isn’t structured to have the transportation benefit managed by the providers. If I want to order a wheelchair, I can order the wheelchair – no problem. That’s not an inducement. But I can’t get a ride. As is, the system has been keeping patients and people from getting what they need. Our platform and the platforms of our partners that we are integrated into are working to solve this gap in the system.

I think it’s important to not only think about the network effects from a “how does it add value”, but also to try to identify these situations where there are real barriers because of the way the benefit design is set up. How do we coalesce and get people to start taking action so that we don’t run into these cases over and over and over again? That’s the question.

Randy Williams:

I see the potential conflicts that you have to overcome when it comes to benefit design and incentive alignment and an ecosystem that isn’t structured to benefit from a platform approach or a platform business model.

In Part II of our conversation with Caitlin and Dr. Cantor, we dive into how Uber Health came to be and how it integrates with other organizations’ software and workflow.