Pink Ribbon Girls clears the road to recovery with Uber Health

Uber Health is proud to see how our work with organizations like Pink Ribbon Girls is making a difference for cancer patients across the US during Breast Cancer Awareness Month and beyond. Pink Ribbon Girls (PRG) is a nonprofit organization founded by breast cancer survivors in 2002. It’s on a mission to ensure that no one has to endure the battle against breast or gynecological cancer alone. 

PRG currently helps cancer patients in 5 regions across the United States: Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio; the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California; and St. Louis, Missouri. The organization’s goal is to support and empower individuals who are undergoing treatment in these locations, as well as their families. With busy appointment schedules and often intense treatments, it can become a struggle for cancer patients to drive themselves to hospitals or clinics and make sure they’re able to adequately care for themselves. That’s why patients primarily turn to Pink Ribbon Girls for help with meal delivery, transportation, house cleaning, and peer support. 

Tackling a big logistics challenge 

Accessible transportation is a widely known social determinant of health, and for patients going through chemotherapy, this can be an even more daunting challenge to tackle. Often unable to drive after appointments, cancer patients frequently rely on caretakers, ranging from paid nurses and helpers to community volunteers and close family members. For many patients, this can put a strain on not just them, but on their families as well. 

PRG was founded to help support these patients and their families through these difficult times. Access to transportation is a core piece of delivering on that mission. That’s why Pink Ribbon Girls has long employed its own transportation system in the Ohio cities it serves. As the organization looked to support more cancer patients across the United States, it began to realize it needed access to more scalable transportation options. 

Initially, PRG relied strictly on its own drivers to serve patients in Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati. But with only 3 drivers per city, coordinating rides for a growing number of patients became difficult. Having more patients than drivers, overlapping appointment times, and appointments that would often run longer than scheduled put undue stress on patients, drivers, and the PRG employee responsible for coordinating care. As Molly Betsinger, PRG’s sole Programming Coordinator, says, “I often felt under pressure, rushed, and distant from patients because I was preoccupied coordinating various schedules.”     

Care begins with getting there 

In 2019, PRG turned to Uber Health’s HIPAA-supported platform to help solve these challenges. With Uber Health’s easy-to-use central dashboard and dedicated support staff, PRG found a solution that made scheduling round-trip rides and requesting multiple rides at a time possible. This simplified Betsinger’s logistics management and meant that PRG could truly begin providing access to transportation services across the US, ensuring that cancer patients can get the treatment they need.   

With Uber Health, Pink Ribbon Girls can now easily coordinate rides to and from appointments, alleviating the pressure on patients, caretakers, and PRG’s own systems. 

Betsinger adds: “The more solutions that have been brought to us by Uber Health, the easier it’s been on us. Now we simply have to click to schedule a ride for a patient and it’s done. Since we started using Uber Health, we are able to spend more quality time with PRG’s clients.”     

We’re there when it counts  

In 2021, Pink Ribbon Girls provided 16,000 rides for clients, and over 10,000 of them were through Uber Health. By leveraging Uber Health, PRG has been able to scale to more cities and states, alleviate stress on the operations side, and—most importantly—ensure that no one goes through their cancer journey alone. 

PRG clients have had great things to say about Uber Health too. Many individuals have noted that they simply aren’t ready to share their personal healthcare journeys with their neighbors and friends just yet. Rides coordinated on the Uber Health platform allow for vehicles without healthcare or medical logos printed on them to drop off and pick up PRG clients, offering them peace of mind and privacy. 

“The best part of my job is hearing that people have completed their radiation treatment and they wouldn’t have been able to do so without the type of transportation we provided,” says Lora Davenport, Director of Programming at PRG. “We’ve found that a lot of our clients have actually begun explicitly asking for rides through Uber Health because they aren’t ready to tell other people about what they’re going through. Without Uber Health, I would have never known that this is a concern for many of our clients. Now we better understand their pain points, allowing us to tailor our offerings to fit their needs.”      

For PRG and the patients it serves, Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time to celebrate all the amazing people who are making remission possible. During this month—and beyond—Uber Health is proud to work with PRG to offer patients the help they need while undergoing treatment for breast or gynecological cancer.