Ride-to-Health : The Impact of Ridesharing on Patients’ Emergency Care Access

Transportation has been one of the obstacles preventing people from timely and appropriate access to healthcare. Emergency Department (ED), which provides around-the-clock care for illnesses and injuries, including life-threatening ones, is known as the “safety net” of the healthcare system. It would be interesting to investigate whether ridesharing platforms, as an alternative transportation option outside private cars, public transit, and ambulance, alleviate the transportation concern, especially for the access to ED services. This paper empirically examines how the entry of Uber, an online ridesharing platform, influences patients’ access to emergency care. We leverage the sequential entries of Uber in different counties in California as a natural experiment setting and use the staggered difference-in-differences model to estimate this impact. We find a positive impact of Uber’s entry on the number of high-severity ED visits. This impact is smaller for EDs that provide more comprehensive care, treat more uninsured patients, and are located in smaller areas. From ED utilization’s perspective, Uber’s entry decreases the number of low acuity ED visits, affects patients’ ED selection by allowing them to travel to EDs beyond the closest ones, increases the patient waiting time, but overall reduces the mortality in ED. Our findings have important managerial and policy implications and contribute to the growing stream of research on the social effects of sharing economy