Uber Health on the company’s new partnership with Feeding America
A Discussion with Uber Health’s Head of Strategy Lauren Steingold
Last week, Uber announced a partnership with Feeding America. Over the next two years, Uber and Feeding America will work with Feeding America’s staff, volunteers, and its network of food banks on a number of initiatives, including donating excess food through Uber Eats partners and helping to connect communities to pantries and grocery stores using Uber Health.
Patchwise Labs spoke with Lauren Steingold, head of strategy at Uber Health, to discuss the partnership as well as Uber Health’s growth since its launch in March 2018.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Patchwise Labs (PL): Thanks for taking time out of your morning to speak with us. Can you give a quick summary of the partnership with Feeding America?
Lauren Steingold (LS): Sure. Feeding America has reported 67% of its clients have to choose between food and transportation, so we know the lack of transport is a huge factor that prevents people from accessing the food they need. After a lot of work with them, we realized that Uber’s platform across our products — Uber Health, Uber Freight, rideshare, and our Eats product — make a great partner to make a difference in the hunger space but also across other social determinants of health.
Over the next two years, we have committed to spending over $1 million with Feeding America to tackle hunger together using Uber’s different products across our platform.
PL: How will success be measured or how will you implement these initiatives?
LS: At this stage, we aren’t announcing the pilot locations or the specifics but we are working very closely with their team to make sure whatever we do with them is something we believe can ultimately scale more broadly. I can really only speak to the Uber Health component of the partnership. Where our team gets really excited is that we know that food security is an important social determinant of health and we believe there’s a natural intersection between transportation, access, and food.
PL: Speaking if Uber Health, you launched in early 2018. How has the product been received or used?
LS: We have over 1,000 healthcare organizations using Uber Health across the U.S. We don’t currently publicly share the breakdown of the number of rides that we’ve done so far. But we’re excited about the growth that we’ve seen.
We’ve grown over 400% year-over-year. We are also hearing from providers that there’s a reduction in no-shows and that more appointments are happening on time.
PL: How has it been working across departments in the company to solve a larger issue?
LS: Honestly, it’s been amazing. I think the Feeding America partnership is a perfect example of that where we had different teams at Uber come to a table to say, “Here’s this problem. What do you and the product that you work on bring to the table? How can we collaborate to help address a larger problem?”
We know Feeding America is a great first partner but I think there’s a lot we can do in this space so there’s a lot of internal excitement around how we can come together. Our team has been focused on removing transportation as a barrier to care but when we realized that accessible and affordable food itself contributes to whether or not someone is a healthy patient, we can’t just be focusing on that ride to and from care. We have to think about rides in a more holistic manner.
PL: Being out in San Francisco, what’s the zeitgeist surrounding tech companies and how they are looking to social determinants?
LS: I’m happy to see how many people are trying to tackle them. I believe there’s no shortage of smart ideas. Where the challenges come in are the ability to scale them. There are a lot of pilots in the healthcare space and they’re great because when you have evidence in this industry, you can scale anything. I think that’s where we can help — mobilize and scale these solutions that are being brought to the table.
PL: And how might the role of technology change as you’re trying to push individuals to use technology to address these more social problems?
LS: I think we’d like to see more people get comfortable with technology … to access things like healthy food or the care that they need. The population that we most serve with Uber Health are people who might be elderly, low-income, or at-risk populations so they aren’t your average Uber rider.
It takes education and awareness and a certain level of trust on behalf of the person or organization that is requesting a ride on their behalf. That takes time and we’re seeing results already but we’d love to do that and make a difference in this space as well.
PL: Medicare Advantage enrollment is just around the corner. 2020 is potentially a big year for supplemental benefits. Any final thoughts on these benefits?
LS: We have been hearing from a number of plans that they are interested in this and they want to know how they can partner with us. Those are conversations we’re currently having which points to why data and capturing data is so important with these initiatives. The more that we can do that across the industry, the more impact we’ll have on social determinants.
