Lyft News

Revolutionizing Patient Transportation with Lyft Concierge API

Rosie Bubb - Mar 5, 2018

As a leader in healthcare transportation, Lyft Business creates solutions and provides world-class service to ensure our partners can address the transportation needs of their patients. With Lyft Concierge, we enable organizations to schedule rides for the people they care about – even if the riders don’t have the Lyft app or a smartphone. An integration through our application programming interface (API) allows organizations to customize and seamlessly weave Lyft Concierge into their own systems.

These solutions are key to reaching our goal of eliminating transportation barriers to health care. Today, 3.6 million Americans have transportation issues that prevent them from getting to or from a doctor’s appointments, and 25% of lower-income patients have missed or rescheduled their appointments due to lack of transportation. We aim to cut these numbers in half by 2020, and soon after, to ensure that transportation is no longer a barrier to care for anyone.

Our new partnership with AllScripts is an important step forward. AllScripts’ seamless integration with the Concierge API will enable any provider to request Lyft rides for up to 7.2 million patients directly within their platform. Organizations like American Medical Response, American Logistics Company, CareLinx, GoGo Grandparent, and One Call are already leveraging Concierge API to successfully improve their patient experience, decrease wait times and reduce costs. With support and technical guidance from our team of industry experts, they have successfully integrated their systems with our network of more than 1.4 million drivers for reliable rides.

Teaming Up with Healthcare Partners to Improve Access to Care

American Medical Response (AMR) and its business unit Access2Care (A2C) are working with Lyft to offer alternative transportation options for routine medical care to thousands of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. The Concierge API allows riders to schedule a trip with one click.

Sven Johnson, COO of AMR shares, “Lyft quickly grasped the unique nature of medical transports and have become the preferred partner for providing fast, reliable and cost-effective transportation — over 90% of our patients choose Lyft as their transportation provider. Our partnership has reduced complaints by 50% and improved on-time performance. These evolutionary changes continue as we work with Lyft to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits, speed-up hospital discharges and provide same-day access to urgent care and clinic appointments.”

The Concierge API also provides needed customization for the healthcare industry. American Logistics Company (ALC) used the Concierge API to develop custom pickup and drop-off zones for large hospital campuses and medical offices — providing patients with curb-to-curb service and reducing cancellations.

"Working with Lyft Business for the last two years, and leveraging their API, American Logistics Company was able to create custom pickup and drop-off locations – a feature that is unique to the industry – therefore creating a much more seamless experience for the passengers,” shares Craig Puckett, CEO of ALC. “This has enabled us to create incredible efficiencies through a 34% reduction in pick-up times, along with a 46.7% increase in overall customer satisfaction. Utilizing further custom API integration tools ALC has been able to increase our Lyft dispatcher efficiency by 1900%."

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Improving Patient Experiences

CareLinx, a nationwide professional caregiver marketplace, helps place licensed caregivers with families. Using the Concierge API, Carelinx developed a custom Lyft experience to enable caregivers and family members to arrange rides for their charges. They built a complete, native ride request experience within their own app.

“Together with Lyft we launched CareRides™, which combines the skills and mobile technology of our network of 200,000 caregivers with rides from Lyft to enable safe door-to-door transportation for our customers,” says Sherwin Sheik, CEO and Founder of Carelinx, Inc. “Through easy integration with Lyft’s Concierge API, our clients can arrange and pay for rides with Lyft right from within the CareLinx app, making it a seamless and positive user experience for customers.”

Decreasing Wait Times

Organizations partnering with Lyft have also given way to the possibility of expanding service availability. People get to and from their appointments in a timely manner with national average wait times of 3 minutes.

GoGoGrandparent turns on-demand transportation companies like Lyft into services that help families take better care of older adults. Seniors can call GoGoGrandparent and request affordable rides without even owning a smartphone. The company built an integration with the Concierge API for their 24/7 operators and improved both availability and speed of pick-ups.

“Lyft's Concierge API is the only one of it's kind on the market. They are aggressively pursuing the healthcare space and winning it with a team of dedicated and compassionate people. Since partnering, our failure rate has dropped nearly 20%," says Justin Boogaard, Co-Founder of GoGoGrandparent.

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Reducing Costs

With Lyft, partners only pay for the rides they use on the Lyft network. The Concierge API provides full transparency and control over pricing, ride types, routes, and more. It also creates more visibility, allowing dispatch agents to monitor the progress of rides in real time.

One Call is the nation’s leading provider of specialized solutions to the workers’ compensation industry, including transportation for injured workers. With the Concierge API, One Call implemented an on-demand and scheduling transportation model - groundbreaking in workers’ compensation - that resulted in the elimination of rush fees and driver wait fees. One Call’s comprehensive solution has decreased claim costs up to 40% for their clients, a significant impact in the healthcare landscape.

The Concierge API empowers organizations to improve transportation experiences by integrating Lyft into their own applications. Learn more about Lyft Business or speak to a Lyft Business team member about the Concierge API.