ShiftMed, the post-acute care staffing company based in McLean, Virginia, has partnered with Uber’s (NYSE: UBER) health care arm.
The partnership will ideally ensure that its 100,000-plus contracted workers have dependable transportation.
“I think everybody’s well aware that there’s a critical shortage of nurses and nursing aides, so we really wanted to enable the nurses to be able to serve more patients and improve the quality of work,” Jacob Laufer, ShiftMed’s chief operating officer, told Home Health Care News. “It starts with removing this transportation challenge and adding it as a transportation benefit.”
ShiftMed is a mobile platform that acts as a middleman between health care providers and workers. The company will directly hire health care workers – including home-based care workers – and contract with health care providers across the continuum to fill their needs.
With its new partnership with Uber Health, ShiftMed workers will be able to access on-demand rides with Uber directly within the ShiftMed app.
Caregivers can request rides to and from their upcoming shifts for both in-home and facility-based appointments. The idea, Laufer said, is to expand a caregiver’s serviceable area and to ease the burden many have when it comes to transportation.
“We think that this is a new chasm of employee benefits,” Laufer said. “A lot has been made about next-day payments and how those are driving meaningful attraction and retention of nurses and aides. We’re excited to bring this to market as a new benefit, which they can leverage to increase their service area as well as be holistically retained.”
Leaders at ShiftMed understand flexibility is among the top priorities for direct care workers today. Partnering with Uber was a natural fit for filling that need, Laufer said.
“We believe that Uber is able to offer our health care professionals the best service and fulfillment when it comes to actually helping them to get to work,” he said. “We want to make sure that we chose a partner that had the best service area and best fulfillment against all the rides being requested across our platform.”
The convenience for caregivers is an obvious incentive for ShiftMed. This partnership is also beneficial for home-based care providers, Laufer said.
“I’m also excited about connecting the dots where there are certain facilities that are not able to get the amount of staff that they need to care for the residents or patients,” Laufer said. “Now they’ll be able to access those caregivers because there are no issues with bus routes or any other barriers.”
The partnership also includes an opportunity for ShiftMed’s health care provider partners to use the service for their own shift coverage and retention activities.
“We understand that one of the biggest challenges facing health care today is the critical staffing shortage,” Caitlin Donovan, global head of Uber Health, said in a press release. “We’re constantly exploring new ways to better support the existing labor pool and help recruit new clinicians. Our unique integration with ShiftMed across multiple levels of their platform will better enable healthcare professionals, which in turn can result in improved patient care and reduced costs for facilities across the country.”
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