A public-health program uses Uber Eats and DoorDash to deliver asthma inhalers to at-risk people before forecasted smoke or pollution events. By matching location data with asthma diagnoses and refill records, they identify people who haven't refilled recently and send them inhalers ahead of time. A $10 inhaler prevents a $2,500 emergency-room visit, and six months of data showed the expected surge in asthma ED visits simply disappeared.
Chapters
I think he partnered with Uber Eats or DoorDash to drop off inhalers, and it actually increased efficiencies and saved lives.
Living in California, you have smoke that occasionally will roll in through San Francisco, and anyone that is asthmatic knows that the minute that there's smoke in the air, air pollution in general can be an exacerbating factor that leads to shortness of breath. And for anybody who's ever felt shortness of breath, it is the scariest thing. And so you start looking at the data and you say, okay, smoke rolls in around these times. We can identify is where these people live. We can also identify with our data who has an inhaler. Has been recently refilled and who doesn't. You start going through it. And so what we devised was, hey, there are people that have not filled their inhalers that have asthma and there's smoke that's going to come in, which will lead them to go to the emergency department. Your average emergency department visit's gonna be about $2,500. The average inhaler refill is about $10. So why don't we fill these and send them to all these people? Lo and behold, you watch the data over the next 6 months and those emergency room visits don't happen.
