A look at Lyft and Uber's foray into the est. $3B non-emergency medical transportation business, where everyday drivers take patients to and from appointments
Within the first week that Austin Correll was driving for Lyft in the fall of 2021, he was sent to pick up passengers at an address that turned out to be for a hospital. Tweets: @johnlegere Tweets: John Legere / @johnlegere : If ambulance rides weren't so expensive - maybe people wouldn't resort to Lyft and Uber. Glad to see these companies stepping up though. https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened years earlier: Uber first signaled healthcare ambitions in 2015 by delivering flu shots and hiring a health advisor, then formalized the play in 2018 with Uber Health, a B2B dashboard letting hospitals and clinics assign patient rides centrally. What began as patients hailing rides themselves has become a structured market — an estimated $3B non-emergency medical transportation business where everyday drivers take patients to and from appointments.
The new reporting adds a training gap on top of that arc: experts worry drivers like Austin Correll, who was dispatched to a hospital address within his first week at Lyft, aren't prepared for medical passengers. That concern echoes the legal-risk exposure flagged back when sick people started taking Uber or Lyft to the emergency room instead of an ambulance.
First-order effects
- Hospitals and clinics gain a cheaper scheduling channel for patient transport through Uber Health-style dashboards, directly displacing traditional NEMT providers in the estimated $3B market.
- Everyday Lyft and Uber drivers are now assigned medical passengers — often without specialized training — as Correll's first-week hospital pickup illustrates.
Second-order effects
- Legacy non-emergency medical transportation operators face price competition from ride-hailing networks whose driver supply already exists, pressuring their per-trip rates.
- The training and liability questions raised here push both platforms toward formalized healthcare products — the same B2B packaging path Uber took with Uber Health rather than leaving it to ad-hoc consumer rides.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ride-hailing platforms become default infrastructure for routine healthcare logistics, with regulators and health systems forced to define training, liability, and access standards for gig drivers carrying patients — a question open since drivers first ferried ER-bound passengers.
The trend: Ride-hailing is absorbing healthcare transportation, evolving from opportunistic consumer rides into B2B platforms that hospitals schedule through dashboards.