Uber Health and analytics company Socially Determined have begun integrating their platforms and jointly marketing their products, which they expect to be adopted mostly by insurers to connect patients to supplemental benefits
The companies are collaborating to provide services to connect high-need patients to transportation, prescription and grocery delivery services, and aim to fully connect their capabilities in the future.
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Uber Health provides a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant platform for payers and providers to link patients with non-emergency medical transportation, as well as food and prescription delivery services. Socially Determined manages a social risk data analytics platform that offers member-level data on health claims, benefit and eligibility design and feedback on patients' social determinants of health. The information is used to create risk scores, allowing healthcare organizations to target patients most likely to experience adverse and costly health outcomes.
The companies are marketing the use of both platforms to providers and insurers as a way to connect high-needs patients with supplemental benefits available through their health plans. The focus is on data-sharing and enhancing the interoperability of the platforms to increase efficiency for providers and payers.
"Our goal right now is doing that in a way that makes it, from a workflow standpoint, easiest for our customers to be able to adopt,” said Socially Determined co-founder and CEO Dr. Trenor Williams. “I think, more than likely, that looks like us feeding our insights directly into the Uber Health platform."
While the companies remain in discussions with potential customers, they anticipate closing deals in the first quarter, primarily with commercial and government-sponsored insurers. Uber Health has more than 3,000 healthcare customers, including Boston Medical Center, according to a news release.
The collaboration between the two companies will rival services provided by companies such as Unite Us and FindCare, known for centralized referral platforms that allow providers to connect patients to social services. For example, Unite Us works with North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to operate a centralized referral system where providers can send patients to community-based organizations to access housing, food insecurity and transportation resources.
The Uber Health and Socially Determined initiative separates itself by linking patients to resources available through their health plans, Williams said.
“This is actually much more tied to explicit benefits that are available for a member population, and being able to link those members that have need directly with an available benefit,” he said. “I think one of the challenges we’ve seen with the community referrals is that it can be really hard to actually close the loop.”
