Uberlances & Ambulyfts: Exploring Ride-sharing Alternatives to Ambulance Transportation
- 2 minsCollegiate EMS agencies routinely encounter patients who require evaluation at a higher level of care but whose condition may not warrant ambulance transport. However, these agencies may not have effective systems in place to facilitate alternative means of transport for low acuity calls. Non-transport collegiate agencies may be forced to request an ambulance from a local EMS provider in these cases, which can contribute to the strain of an already busy urban EMS system. Ride-sharing programs like Uber and Lyft offers a potential solution to allow for immediate, low-acuity patient transport while avoiding a significant cost to the patient and the loss of an available transporting EMS unit.
At the 2019 annual conference of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation, Dr. Leonard Weiss and I presented a lecture which examined the practice of EMS crews arranging patient transport via ride-sharing services, instead of ambualnce transport, for low acuity patients. We examined the clinical, operational, and policy decisions required to effectively facilitate patient transport via a taxi or ride-share based system through a 4-year study of a local collegiate EMS agency that routinely facilitates patient transport to hospitals and urgent care facilities via means alternative to ambulances. In addition to reviewing to the clinical data and medical decision-making required to determine the appropriateness of using ride-sharing services in lieu of an ambulance, this presentation sought to enable audience members to extrapolate and estimate the impact of incorporating ride-sharing services into their transport options.
Learning objectives for audience members included re-evaluating an EMS crews’ options for arranging patient transport to definitive care, understanding the medical and clinical considerations required to allow patients to refuse ambulance transport and instead be transported via alternative means to a definitive care facility, and understanding the operational impact to both a collegiate EMS agency and a local ambulance provider through the intelligent use of ride-sharing services as an appropriate clinical transport alternative. We sought to enable audience members to estimate the impact of incorporating ride-sharing service transports for their own collegiate service through discussion of our real-world cast study and ensure that participants understood the importance and relevance of alternative transportation options for modern EMS even beyond the collegiate environment.
Header image source: Cooney and Conway’s Guide to the Key Benefits of Ridesharing.
Tom Goode
Data Scientist & EMS Researcher