Ride-share company Lyft released data on how it is helping hospitals and health plans improve preventive care access, emergency room overuse and overall experience for Medicaid patients.
Four updates to know:
1. Lyft partners with several large hospital systems, including St. Louis-based Ascension, Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare and Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health. One of Lyft's partners — Alameda Health System Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif. — saw a 73 percent decrease in no-shows for primary care visits and $400,000 in annual savings by using Lyft's on-demand transportation system, Megan Callahan, vice president of healthcare at Lyft, told Becker's.
2. In 2018, AmeriHealth Caritas DC, a Medicaid plan serving more than 100,000 residents of the District of Columbia, partnered with Access2Care, a nonemergency medical transportation manager that works with Lyft. AmeriHealth Caritas DC saw a 40 percent decrease in ER use and a 12 percent decrease in ambulance use among the 11,400 members who used the transportation service.
3. Another Medicaid insurer, Centene Corp., began working with its transportation managers to launch Lyft pilot programs at four of its subsidiary health plans in 2018. To date, those subsidiaries have seen a 66 percent decrease in rider complaints, and average wait times have fallen from 28 minutes to seven minutes.
4. Medicaid insurer Amerigroup Tennessee, which partnered with Lyft in 2019, has seen a 50 percent decrease in primary care gaps and a 44 percent increase in primary care visits among members using the transportation service.
To read more about the programs, click here.