Uber Health is growing rapidly below the waterline right across Australia, but it’s probably not what you’re thinking.
Uber health is a term used generically in Australia a lot these days, and most often not in a nice way, so when I saw someone walking past me at Australian Healthcare Week yesterday with “Uber Health” emblazoned on a t-shirt I at first thought this person was just attention seeking.
Turns out, this person was the No 2 employee (there’s now a third) of Uber Health in Australia – yes, the actual Uber.
Possibly more surprisingly, Uber Health is already being used in a lot of healthcare facilities across Australia, and, eek! It’s growing wildly.
But it’s very probably not what you are thinking (which is likely what I was thinking when I saw this person, which was mostly all bad).
“Uber health” is used regularly in the media these days describe platform-based health plays, usually by private for-profit players, often backed by venture capital, often telehealth-based, and very often bad for system and patients. It’s a derogatory term on the provider side of healthcare which envisages low-cost, online channelling of consumer desires and insecurities, with no connection to a patient’s proper care framework.
Turns out, the actual Uber Health isn’t that at all.
It’s plain old (can I say boring, even) Uber – the car ride service – or a version thereof. It’s adapted specifically for healthcare providers and businesses that need transport to be more organised and efficient, with lots of data and analytics thrown in so a user can keep improving the transport logistics of their operation based on real-time information.
The fear and loathing that we’ve come to associate with the term “Uber health” has its origins in the five horseman of the digital apocalypse – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – each of which have very big positions in healthcare now, and each of which are using their digital distribution monopolies to consumers to, at times, walk all over a lot of traditional healthcare business models and channels.
This is sometimes to the detriment of patients, especially those who want healthcare products and service like they want their streaming tv, hotel booking and car ride services.
The real Uber Health is, in a manner, fairly pedestrian when you think about the other digital platforms wanting a slice of healthcare. But if you’re running a hospital, an aged care home, an NDIS service or any major healthcare provision service that has to deal with the complicated logistics of getting patients, staff, contractors or product transported when things are backing up, it might be as neat and simple an idea for saving money and improving the efficiency of your health entity as you’re going to come across.
Essentially, it’s providing an on-demand transport service, but with tracking, analytics and finance reporting built in. And it’s literally at the fingertips of healthcare providers and facility administrators to pilot with only a little more stuffing around than setting up your personal Uber account.
Uber Health is competing with the usual suspects in transport logistics – cabs (sometimes still handing out cab charge dockets to clients), transport leasing companies, and even the complication of a healthcare facility running its own fleet of vehicles.
No 2 employee, Steve Lutz, told Health Services Daily (in an American accent … what else) that unbeknown to most people, health was rapidly becoming one of the major business verticals for Uber globally.
He said that in Australia the service started very simply as the business tab now available to all consumers on the normal Uber app. But Australia had been showing so much de novo growth in healthcare with just this feature that Uber decided to start putting some boots on the ground.
Mr Lutz is here to make the service and its utility better known across the country and to service larger clients with more complex business requirements that he says are starting to use the service.
According to Mr Lutz the service is already used by all sorts of Australian healthcare providers and facilities, including LHDs in NSW, HHSs in Queensland and some hospital networks in Victoria, some of the big pathology providers, selected pharmacy chains for things like script delivery, NDIS and aged care providers for client and staff transport, and some larger corporate clinic-based healthcare providers.
“In some cases specialist providers are giving their patients complimentary Uber trips to and from an appointment in order to ensure that high-value appointments were assured to happen and the time of specialists was not being wasted,” said Mr Lutz.
He told HSD that, as is typical in healthcare, a lot of providers he is now talking to are wary of changing any process, but that upon doing short-term pilots the size of savings and the efficiency of being able to provide cloud-based data and analytics, not just on the financials but on the details of each trip, is quickly leading to conversion.
“Clients are finding the readily available data and analytics they get with Uber Health is transforming how they deal with transport in their organisations,” he said.
“If my nurse staff is having to go for a homecare visit, I can literally book the ride for them and watch to see that the ride take place.
“If it goes in a weird direction, you might get a notification to say that a ride shouldn’t have done that.
“The other thing I love about the Uber kind of relationship between the rider and the driver is that they’re constantly making sure that the other one is satisfied with the service.
“All this helps build better transport logistics for organisations.”