Ride-to-Health: The Impact of Ridesharing on Patients’ Emergency Care Access
41 Pages Posted: 18 Apr 2022 Last revised: 1 Feb 2025
Date Written: April 5, 2022
Abstract
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. While transportation is an important factor patients consider when making decisions regarding ED visits, it is unclear a priori whether ridesharing platforms, as an alternative transportation option outside private cars, public transit, taxis, and ambulances, can alleviate the transportation concern and significantly influence patients’ decisions on seeking emergency care beyond merely substituting existing transportation methods. This paper empirically examines how the entry of Uber, an online ridesharing platform, influences patients’ utilization of 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 that Uber’s entry significantly increases the number of high-severity ED visits while simultaneously reducing the number of low-acuity ED visits. Analyses using additional data provide suggestive evidence that the contrasting effects may be related to the role of preventable ED visits and the interdependence between emergency and primary care services. We also observe heterogeneous effects of ridesharing services across hospitals with different patient compositions and diverse service and location characteristics. Our findings have important managerial and policy implications and contribute to the growing stream of research on the social effects of the sharing economy.
Keywords: ridesharing platform, emergency care, natural experiment, difference-in-differences
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