Uber and Lyft are trying hard to make roadways into the healthcare transportation space, with the aim to scale up their operations and also to help providers to improve on the care they provide patients. Healthcare depends a lot on patients making it to the appointments. Nationally, missed appointment cost healthcare providers as much as $150 billion per year. No show rates seem to be high too- 30%. These statistics come from SCI Solutions committed to providing IT services to the healthcare industry.

Thus, Uber and Lyft are providing an apt service to house-bound patients rather than depending on a medical transport van or taxi. This service is getting highly popular amongst doctors and hospitals for the same reasons as millions of people choose to use the app to call a ride; its simply cheap, quick, it provides a door to door facility and is easy to track at a glance.

Uber Health went live last week, after going on an eight-month trial with 100 healthcare providers who tested the service to ensure that patients make it to the appointments. Lyft built a two-year effort in order to provide doctors its platform along with Allscripts as its partner. Allscripts is a medical records company and it adds an estimate of 7 million patients through 180,000 physicians and 2,500 hospitals.

Lyft aims to reduce the number of patients who miss appointments and crucial care, only because they don’t have an access to appropriate non-emergency medical transport. Its goal is to reduce the number of American patients failing to get care for this reason to half by 2020.