Sick people in the US are increasingly using Uber or Lyft to get to the emergency room, instead of an ambulance, exposing drivers to potential legal risks
Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
This story is one stop in a long-running arc of Uber and Lyft drifting into health care. It started with Uber delivering flu shots and hiring its first health advisor, then a critical response hotline tested in 22 US cities, and later formalized into the non-emergency medical transportation business both companies entered, where experts already worried that everyday drivers aren't trained for medically vulnerable passengers.
What this report adds is the informal edge of that same trend: patients routing themselves to emergency rooms through ordinary rideshare trips, with no medical protocol and no clear answer to who carries the liability when something goes wrong en route.
First-order effects
- Drivers are the immediate exposure: a passenger deteriorating in the back seat puts an untrained contractor in a de facto medical transport role they never signed up for, with unclear legal responsibility if the outcome is bad.
Second-order effects
- The pattern pressures Uber and Lyft to formalize what is currently ad hoc — either building safeguards and training akin to their structured non-emergency medical transportation offerings, or writing policies that explicitly route medical cases elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If patient self-routing to ERs keeps growing, regulators and insurers will eventually have to draw a line between transportation and medical care inside rideshare trips — the same boundary question raised by the companies' telemedicine and health partnerships.
The trend: Rideshare platforms are absorbing health-care transport work faster than liability rules and driver training are catching up, pushing the boundary between a car service and a medical service.