Uber Aims to Start Delivering Medicine to To Patients who Lack Access

Uber is hoping to do something pretty notable.

A company which started as a ride hailing service, moved on to fast food delivery, and is now aiming to deliver medicines to those who are not able to have access to it.

At the recent CB Insights Future of Health conference, Uber’s health chief Dan Trigub explained how the company is going to leverage Uber Eats to address very specific needs of patients that lack access to reliable transportation. According to Trigub, Uber has been sitting on this idea for years.

Uber Health’s focus has been on partnering with providers and transportation brokers to get patients to and from appointments, said the Chief of Health. He added that currently, the company doesn’t have the infrastructure to bill health plans or a government payor. Once this is figured out, the company plans to deliver food and prescriptions to patients who need it.

“How do we allow plans to have a curated meal that they want to get to their plan member,” Triqub asked. “You don’t want to be sending Big Macs to a diabetic patient.”

Uber Health’s idea is “very different that what Meals on Wheels is doing,” remarked Lucy Theilheimer, Meals on Wheels’ chief strategy and impact officer to Yahoo Finance.

Meals on Wheels also uses volunteers and staff to conduct “in-home assessments of what the needs are of these individuals, what their activity limitations may be, the volunteers are trained to engage with and have some social human contact with the seniors.”

Theilheimer added that they “are doing safety checks in the home and identifying if there are fall risks and hazards, connecting them to other services that may help them to stay independent in the home. They’ve been serving as those ‘eyes and ears in the home’ for decades as part of what they do.”

“I think there are a lot of people in the for-profit world…that see this as a business opportunity,” she told Yahoo Finance. “Because everybody’s trying to figure out how to solve this problem of high cost, high needs, complex care patients, and a lot of them tend to be seniors.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Uber Technologies Inc. (NYSE: UBER) mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.