Last year, Uber, Paypal, Walgreens and LISC teamed up to supply free rides to COVID vaccine appointments for people with barriers to transportation via an $11 million fund. Those rides have not only expanded vaccine access to underserved residents, they have turned out to be a vehicle to broader vaccine education and wellbeing.
All photos courtesy Uber
When Isimar Lopez tells her fellow Bronx residents she can get them a free, door-to-door ride with Uber to get a COVID-19 vaccine, they don’t always jump at the chance. “I have people ask me, ‘Is this a gimmick? What’s the catch?’” says Lopez, a nutrition counselor and coordinator with the Bronx-based health service organization NYREACH.
But because Lopez is a welcoming, relatable person who grew up in the Bronx herself, she’s able to reassure them that they truly won’t be charged a dime and—perhaps more important—their personal data won’t be shared. She can also share credible information about the COVID vaccines themselves, their safety records, and where to get a shot.
Via this informed, patient process of communication, NYREACH has facilitated some 600 free rides with Uber during the latter half of 2021, mostly from homes and other locations around the Bronx to one of the clinics or urgent-care centers of Essen Health Care, a key NYREACH partner and vaccine administrator.
One 57-year-old man, undocumented and uninsured, gratefully accepted a ride based on the assurance that his privacy would be secure and that after his shot the driver could return him directly to his place of work; the ride allowed him to dash out on a break to get the vaccine, without risking his livelihood. Another client phoned Lopez asking about a ride for her elderly mother; her mom was ready to get vaccinated, she explained, but couldn’t walk far enough to use public transit.
A common denominator among these riders, says Lopez: under ordinary circumstances, most had limited resources to pay for transportation.
A joint effort to overcome access barriers
The push to get each and every eligible person immunized against an infectious disease that so far has killed more than 826,000 U.S. residents has been a massive undertaking requiring a very intensive level of cooperation, from the grassroots on up. If Lopez and NYREACH are tightly connected to their neighbors in the Bronx, their work in turn is backed by LISC, along with three major U.S. corporations—Uber, PayPal, and Walgreens—that are eager to do their part.
Last spring the three companies created a Vaccine Access Fund of $11 million to enable free rides with Uber to vaccination sites on a large scale, in the underserved communities of color that have suffered the pandemic’s cruelest brunt (and where logistical and financial hurdles related to transportation are just one of many inequities). Uber and PayPal also partnered to help customers donate through their apps, quickly boosting the fund to over $12 million. LISC’s job has been to get those resources to places most in need, distributing grants to some 80 on-the-ground organizations like NYREACH that do the hands-on work of booking rides for local people using the HIPAA-supported Uber Health platform.
Like the unprecedented challenge of COVID itself, the rollout of this novel access initiative has required adaptation and trouble-shooting in real time. Last summer, as more vaccine pop-up sites became available within easy reach of people’s homes—and overall demand for the vaccine plummeted—the fund partners expanded eligibility for the rides. They can now be used not just to get the shot itself but also to touch base with health care or other trusted providers who can talk with riders about the value of vaccination while delivering other services. This expansion was very well received; uptake of the rides increased significantly. The national partners also agreed that an “innovation pool” of available funds could be used to support local organizations’ labor-intensive outreach and incentives for would-be vaccinees.
“Flexibility has been the name of the game,” says Julia Ryan, LISC vice president for health initiatives. “What we learned quite early on is that the Uber Health technology is extraordinarily efficient, but it must work hand in hand with direct community outreach. It’s about the actual engagement with people to convince them to pursue the vaccine and then pick up the ride. We were feeling the need to put more resources out with the groups to support all that work and the staff time required for it.”
Using Uber for education, compassionate care, and COVID protection
The result is that dozens of community centers, health clinics, and advocacy groups around the country are incorporating rides with Uber into an all-out effort to reach at-risk neighbors with potentially lifesaving information and inoculations.
In Duluth, MN, for example, the nonprofit Ecolibrium3 has facilitated a few dozen vaccine rides, largely for highly transient individuals, some of whom could not identify their address of origin and would likely not have managed to get vaccinated without a ride. But much more than that, the group printed 8,000 flyers, dropped literature across a low-income Duluth neighborhood, and leveraged the Uber program to support the vaccine outreach of many other local agencies. Ecolibrium3 became a go-to organization for local people to find out about vaccine resources.
In the Los Angeles area, the health-equity organization National Health Foundation (NHF) has used the rides for guests in its recuperative-care housing program, where people experiencing homelessness can safely heal from illness or injury after discharge from a hospital. “We are talking about a very vulnerable population, especially in terms of COVID risk,” says NHF chief strategy officer Danielle T. Cameron. “And this is a population that certainly has trepidation in getting vaccinated.”
One NHF guest had repeatedly missed medical appointments due to early-onset dementia, but got his second COVID shot thanks to an easy, door-to-door ride with Uber. Another, who is terminally ill, used Uber to help get to the hospital for a non-emergent need, and received his booster while there. Uber enabled one guest to reconnect with a local LGBTQ center where he too got boosted against COVID. A fourth guest, who is blind, used Uber for rides back and forth to a clinic to have dentures molded, then fitted; the clinic also administered his second dose of vaccine.
As these anecdotes suggest, lack of access to efficient transportation was an issue in health care long before COVID came on the scene. In 2017, according to one study, 5.8 million people in the U.S. delayed medical care because they lacked a way to get there. Transportation barriers are one contributing factor to high rates of patient “no-shows” for medical appointments and unfilled prescriptions, compromising both efficiency and quality of care.
Tackling a complex problem, one ride at a time
This program has revealed just how pervasive and varied are the reasons for this difficulty of access. Sometimes, for instance, it’s a caregiving issue. The Uber access initiative has allowed moms to pile small kids into a car rather than haul them on a long bus ride to appointments. One mother called up the YMCA in Raritan Bay, NY, and said she’d decided to seek vaccination for her two disabled teen sons but didn’t have a car to make the trip as a family; the YMCA booked a ride, and the kids were vaccinated before the school year began.
Many, like the NYREACH rider, cannot spare the time from work to walk for blocks and wait for trains or buses. For other people, the physical demands of navigating available transit systems independently are just too much. That was the case for a man in Bellingham, WA, who had racked up multiple no-shows for vaccine appointments when Unity Care NW arranged a ride with Uber to bring him to his second shot. This saved the man two hours and spared him the pain of walking almost a mile to and from the bus stop. He’s now protected against COVID-19.
Even when riders did not get a vaccine, they have received information along with needed services, illustrating that even in non-pandemic times reliable and reasonably accessible transportation is key to consistent health care. In Atlanta, a woman rode with Uber to a long-overdue mammogram. In Hartford, CT, a woman with small children and experiencing a high-risk pregnancy was able to get to her prenatal appointments. On Long Island, a man using a walker accessed dialysis, and a woman who suffers extreme anxiety outside her home was able to ride with her young son to a critical intake interview for his partial hospitalization.
Free rides with Uber are just a piece of the solution to these complex access issues. Multiple solutions are surely the way to achieve fuller vaccination coverage against the continuing onslaught of COVID-19. The Uber rides effort will continue at least through next summer.
Lopez, of NYREACH, says people will sometimes wander into the nonprofit’s offices seeming “lost” and asking about the vaccine. “I tell them, ‘You’ve come to the right place,’” she says with a laugh. Lopez can help them find a convenient time and place to receive the vaccine. And she can arrange a ride with Uber to help carry them there, and home again, in a comfortable and efficient way.
If your organization would like to be considered for a grant for ride coordination or the new “Innovation Pool” fill out the intake form below.