Lyft Partners with Electronic Health Record Company Epic

Need to Know

• The Lyft for Epic integration allows healthcare workers to schedule a ride for a patient directly from the patient’s profile within Epic.
• Healthcare workers can schedule rides to appointments, which could help reduce missed appointments, as well as home from them.
• Lyft is hoping to use the integration to measure the impact of rideshare on personal health.
• Epic is one of the leading electronic health records companies in North America.

Analysis

Lyft is partnering with electronic health record (EHR) company Epic to provide healthcare professionals the option to schedule rides for patients from directly within their medical records profile.

The Lyft for Epic integration will enable doctors, nurses, and physicians to schedule rides to or from appointments from directly within a patient’s EHR database, reducing the need for them to navigate to a third-party app to organize transportation. Healthcare workers are already familiar with Epic, and the new integration will save time and reduce friction during the booking and appointment-management process.

In addition, the ability to schedule pick-ups for patients ahead of scheduled appointments will reduce the number of appointments that are missed: according to Lyft, data has demonstrated that the use of its services helps reduce no-show rates by up to 27%. Pickup from medical offices, meanwhile, helps reduce waiting-room volume—which is vital during these times, when COVID-19 has led to restrictions on how many people can safely occupy an indoor space.

Lyft currently partners with nine out of the top 10 US health systems, and almost 30% of medical offices that already use Epic partner with Lyft for their non-emergency medical transportation needs. David Carmouche of one such organization, Ochsner Health, says the Epic-Lyft integration “is providing a solution that makes it easier for patients to seek out high-quality care when they need it and without unnecessary delays due to a lack of transportation.”

“Access to reliable transportation is a common barrier to seeking healthcare,” Carmouche, who is the Senior Vice President of Community Care at Ochsner, said, “especially for our most vulnerable patients.”

Lyft has been working throughout the pandemic to improve the safety and efficacy of its services for riders and drivers. The app now prompts riders that mask-wearing is mandatory throughout their ride, and requires drivers to wear a mask while they’re sharing a car with a passenger. Early in the pandemic, the company pivoted to grocery delivery to meet a surge in demand: in April, more than 120,000 Lyft drivers signed up for Essential Deliveries, the Lyft service through which government agencies, non-profits, and other organizations that work with vulnerable communities could request the delivery of meals, groceries, medication, and other household items from Lyft drivers.