Uber integrates blockchain application Solve.Care into Uber Health

Transport, healthcare and blockchain are a good combination.

In a nutshell, Uber Health is a system that lets hospitals and other healthcare professionals and organisations request, manage and pay for people's rides. It functions as a dashboard that lets healthcare organisations get an all-in-one tool for sorting out Uber rides for patients, guests, employees and others.

"Every year, an estimated 3.6 million Americans miss their medical appointments due to a lack of reliable transportation, with the cost of missed primary care appointments estimated at US$150 billion annually," says Uber Health head Dan Trigub. "Via our HIPAA-compliant solutions, we are working to facilitate rides for patients who might not have access or the ability to use smartphones, and to improve access to care for patients with mobility issues."

Uber Health has several advantages over just telling patients to book an Uber. As Trigub said, the rider doesn't even need to have a phone, and it also lets healthcare organisations sort out multiple rides for patients, staff and caregivers from the same account as well as allow for scheduling of rides days in advance. It also gives a dashboard for organisations to manage all rides-in-motion in real time, and it's a convenient way of having all the billing information, ride histories and so on all in one place.

Solve.Care is a healthcare blockchain platform that aims to reduce the administrative burden of providing healthcare by offering an all-in-one platform for patients, doctors, insurers and other organisations.

The broad idea is to tie together all the disparate entities in the "healthcare supply chain" and to make everything secure but conveniently available to the correct parties where needed. The blockchain element of Solve.Care takes the form of smart contracts bound to a blockchain, which detail the relationship between different entities. Events are maintained on a public blockchain to ensure they're immutable, while the confidential details of these events such as prescriptions or doctor's notes are securely kept on a private system.

The partnership

The partnership involves the integration of Uber Health's transport solutions into the Care.Wallet – the application through which users interact with the Solve.Care system. This allows for more effective coordination between patients, providers, employers and family members in relation to assistance, arrival, costs and schedule adjustments.

It brings a non-emergency medical transportation service to the Solve.Care platform.

For example, say you have an insurer and clinic using Solve.Care and Uber Health, and you have a mobility-impaired patient headed to the clinic for a regular appointment on an Uber Health ride.

By working these systems together, you can organise things to book wheelchair-friendly transport for the patient in advance, and then alert the doctor of cancellations or hold-ups such as if the patient is caught in traffic. Meanwhile, the clinic can demonstrate to the insurer that the patient's travel and the appointment took place, so the insurer can verify that those are (or aren't) covered by the patient's insurance and release the payment appropriately.

Through this system, you could theoretically get the following benefits:

• Improved efficiency in the clinic, with staff saving time by knowing exactly when the patient's arriving
• A greatly reduced paperwork load for all parties by being able to digitally record all the details needed to make and verify an insurance claim
• Reduced chance of errors all around
• Faster, automated payments to free up more resources

"We believe our partnership with Uber Health supports Solve.Care in our mission to become the leading global healthcare benefits administration solution and help eradicate barriers to care for patient populations," Solve.Care CEO Pradeep Goel says.

"Through our partnership with Uber Health, Solve.Care is bringing managed transportation benefits to healthcare programs and allows transportation to be integrated into the specific care needs of a patient. By offering access to this Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) service, we expect to improve the results of clinical delivery, and reduce overall healthcare costs for everyone."

The Uber Health and Care.Wallet integration is scheduled to be released sometime in Q2 2019, and a US insurer is expected to deploy it in Q3 2019.

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Disclosure: The author holds BNB and BTC at the time of writing.

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