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Across the nation, fee-for-service is giving way to value-based care contracts. And as those scales tip, Buck Poropatich, the new head of healthcare for Lyft, thinks rideshare will be key to value-based care success.
This comes after nearly two years of a global pandemic in which Lyft and other rideshare services demonstrated how well they could scale up patient access to care. When COVID-19 caused a slowdown in public transportation and multi-load vehicles, there was a tremendous void left in the healthcare industry.
As patient access to COVID-19 testing started to ramp up, and last winter huge swathes of people became eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, Poropatich said companies like Lyft were able to fill in the blanks. Lyft was responsible for getting the numerous people without a ride to a testing or vaccine site to access their care without a hitch.
“A lot of modalities were pulled away, then all of a sudden there was this acute window where you had to get a highly vulnerable population to critical appointments, vaccine being most relevant, quickly,” he told PatientEngagementHIT in a recent interview. “We stepped into the void, and we just basically expanded our propensity or populations of rides in which we service.”