Rideshare app Lyft is partnering with corporations and healthcare organizations to create an initiative that will help connect members of underserved communities to vaccination sites once the Covid-19 vaccine becomes widely available.

Rideshare startup Lyft will integrate its concierge rides services with Epic’s electronic medical record system. The service allows healthcare providers and other businesses to order rides for their patients.

The health system has seen double-digit savings so far and its leaders are also hoping to figure out new ways to incorporate ridesharing.

The deal builds on an collaboration with Lyft announced earlier this year which opened up the company’s Care.Wallet application to the rideshare company’s healthcare customers.

The San Francisco company received approval to register as a non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) provider, following the state’s decision to allow rideshare companies to qualify for the designation.

Users of Solve.Care’s Care.Wallet can schedule Lyft rides to medical appointments and pharmacies and then can pay for the ride using their Care.Wallet.

The move was driven in part by a CMS decision to open reimbursement channels for Medicare Advantage plans looking to innovate with supplemental benefits that can promote health outside of the clinical care setting.

Megan Callahan, who previously held roles with Change Healthcare and McKesson, joins the rideshare company as its first vice president of healthcare.

Call9 physicians and on-site first responders can schedule Lyft rides for family members of patients who are in the nursing homes where Call9 operates.

After an initial two-month pilot in 2016 with Lyft garnered promising results, the partnership grew throughout 2017 to 7,000 rides per month, accounting for 91 percent of CareMore’s curb-to-curb NEMT rides.

News of the command center, which is aimed at providing non-emergency medical transportation to patients, comes after Hackensack Meridian’s JFK Medical Center launched a pilot with Lyft.

The deal was the latest in what has been a hive of activity in the medical transportation realm in the past couple of years.

Uber has launched Uber Health, a service that allows healthcare organizations to order rides for patients to get to and from appointments. The offering is HIPAA compliant, and patients don’t need the Uber app or a smartphone to utilize it.

Circulation’s deal with Lyft is the latest in a series of healthcare deals the rideshare business has inked to provide Non Emergency Medical Transportation to healthcare organizations to ensure patients without access to transport arrive at their medical appointments.

Michael and Judith Gaulke, a Silicon Valley couple, has given $20 million to establish the Michael and Judith Gaulke Innovation Hatchery Endowment Fund at Sutter Health.

Both San Francisco companies are looking to serve patients who need non-emergency medical transportation but may not necessarily own smartphones and/or be Uber and Lyft riders.

In a study published Tuesday in JAMA, Anthem subsidiary CareMore Health Plan demonstrated how it collaborated with the ride service Lyft to reduce patient waiting times by 30 percent and cut per-ride costs by 32.4 percent.