Inside VA’s drive to offer rideshare services to vets

The Veterans Health Administration has expanded a rideshare program across its operations to help retired servicemembers who are facing mobility issues access critical medical services.

Initially known as the VHA-Uber Health Connect initiative — or VUHC — the program was conceived in 2021 as a project by Indra Sandal, then the innovation specialist at the Memphis VA Medical Center and the recipient of a fellowship from the VHA Innovation Ecosystem. 

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW, Sandal said veterans’ frequent issues with traveling to and from medical appointments convinced her of the need to focus her project on creating an innovative solution to address these concerns.

”Transportation is one of the largest barriers to access to care for the veterans,” she said, noting that previous VHA studies have found that roughly 1.8 million medical appointments are canceled each year because of a lack of mobility options. 

Sandal — who served as the VUHC’s national lead and is currently the chief of innovation at James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Florida — added that canceled and rescheduled appointments have also been a financial drain, costing the agency nearly $4.4 billion each year.

The VUHC initiative formally rolled out in January 2022 as a pilot collaboration between the VHA Innovation Ecosystem, the Veteran Transportation Program and Uber Health. The program was the first time that Uber Health — which calls itself “a HIPAA-enabled platform for non-emergency medical transportation services” — was combined with a large healthcare system. 

“We wanted to optimize the process and wanted to use the one rideshare, which was Uber Health,” Sandal said, adding that the department integrated the Uber Health dashboard “in the transportation system of the VA” so officials could schedule rides for veterans.

Veterans were able to participate in the program if they were eligible for beneficiary travel and lacked their own vehicle. The cost of the rides was covered by the VA medical center. 

Through the rideshare program, veterans could schedule transportation either 15-20 minutes ahead of time or as far out as six months. Sandal said the opportunity to schedule rides far in advance “was a game changer for the dialysis patients,” in particular, since those veterans are on a more scheduled routine. 

The VUHC initiative was implemented in two phases, beginning with 10 VA medical centers and then expanding to an additional 58 VA centers by March 2024. During the life of the VUHC program, roughly 38,000 unique veterans were able to complete approximately 263,000 rides to and from medical facilities.

VA announced at the beginning of May that it was expanding the program across the enterprise and would be rebranding it as the Veterans Transportation Program Beneficiary Travel Rideshare Services. The department also added Lyft as one of the rideshare services that veterans could access through the initiative.

The expanded program is now being used by 101 VA medical center sites, of which 15 use Lyft and nine use both providers. As of data from the end of August, Sandal said the rideshare initiative — both the VUHC and the current iteration — has provided a total 438,000 rides. 

Sandal said the Veteran Transportation Program office is also working to integrate the dashboard for the rideshare program into its large ‘mode of transportation’ dashboard so mobility managers at VA medical facilities have the ability to see what types of transportation options are available for veterans. 

“That's a big, big piece of it, she said. “By this December, all the modes of transportation will be integrated together on one platform.”