Uber's latest one-day promotion kicked off on Thursday: UberHEALTH, the company's first concerted effort to move into health care delivery.
The company announced that Uber users in Boston, New York City, or Washington, D.C., could order a free flu shot between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.
And Flüber's terms sounded appealing*.
"We're leveraging the reliability and efficiency of the Uber platform and launching a one-day pilot program — UberHEALTH — in select cities today," an Uber blog post reads. "Together with our partner Vaccine Finder we will bring flu prevention packs and shots directly to you – at the single touch of a button."
To be clear, Uber drivers weren't administering the shots; they'd transport registered nurses to a user's location, and the nurses could give up to 10 flu shots.
But speaking purely as a consumer, it wasn't the smoothest rollout. In D.C., Uber sent a 9 a.m. email alerting users that flu shots-on-demand would be available — but I didn't get it until nearly 1 p.m., two hours before the promotion was scheduled to end. And while I logged into Uber and saw the prompt from Uber Health, per the image below, I was repeatedly unable to actually order a flu shot.
In a one-day trial, Uber prompted its customers to order a flu shot — although actually ordering one... [+]
Perhaps this lack of availability spoke to the service's mass popularity. But one writer thought it might be an intentional play by Uber: Get attention and drive up awareness, even if they weren't actually putting many services on the street.
"I tried to summon the Flüber a handful of times, starting at 10 a.m. sharp. No dice," Galen Moore writes for BostInno. "Just for fun, I moved the pin over to Boston's Longwood Medical Area, arguably the tightest concentration of advanced health care institutions in the world. Still nothing."
* Also, all credit to Moore for the Flüber portmanteau.
Health care on demand
Regardless of Uber's short-term strategy — and at least a handful of users like Emily were able to get their free flu shots — there's a clear long-term trend here.
The rise of smartphones, and online services that connect patients and providers, means that some health care services are increasingly going on demand.
Uber framed Thursday's flu shot initiative as "bringing the house call back," but that's not quite right. Instead, it was more like just-in-time delivery to bring health care services to your smartphone. And Uber isn't alone in pushing intriguing pilots.
- DHL is currently testing drug delivery-by-drone, with a remote German island serving as the initial pilot. Amazon also may be eying a similar move down the road.
- Google is partnering with select providers so that when you search the Web for symptoms — say, "food poisoning" — you get prompted to be connected with a doctor.
In some ways, Walmart's own push to launch health care clinics is related to this initiative — that non-traditional players are thinking of tactics to capture health care dollars, in part by disrupting traditional referral patterns. And compared to Uber, Walmart has one powerful economic argument on its side: It's more expensive to put a nurse in a car all day and send her around town, rather than stuck her in a store and have patients come to you.
But Walmart's clinics requires customers to actually walk into the doors of a store. Uber, or DHL, or Google are trying to reach users where they live — or even, where they're walking down the street.
We're still far from surgery by smartphone, and who knows if UberHEALTH turned out to be a win for Uber itself. However, the interest and buzz was strong and generally favorable for the company, which means we likely haven't seen the last of Uber's idea to use its fleet of vehicles to deliver health care.
And who knows. Maybe the long-awaited "Uber for health care" ... will end up being Uber.
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