Although designed to help employers by routing their workers to higher-quality, lower-cost health care providers, Uber Health's latest partnership may expose the companies to certain risks and liabilities, legal experts said.

Last week, the ride-hailing giant's growing health arm announced it has teamed up with health tech startup Grand Rounds, which works with large, self-insured employers to provide employees with a platform that helps them with everything from getting a second opinion to scheduling appointments with appropriate physicians. Now that also includes employees' Uber rides to medical appointments at the expense of the employers and their health plans.

Although Uber Health seemingly understands that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulates its receipt of protected health information and apparently takes steps to secure it—operating the platform on its own interface, for example—its transportation services may present issues that are not immediately apparent, said Diana Maier of employment and privacy law firm Maier Law Group.

Maier cites as an example the case of a health care worker who escorts a patient in a wheelchair from the facility to a waiting Uber vehicle with a message to the driver that the patient just received chemotherapy and thus is very weak or just had a named procedure and should lie down on the back seat during the ride. Although provided orally, such data qualify as protected health information that would trigger privacy regulations such as HIPAA, she added.   

“There seems to me that there is a risk there,” she said. “If this is going to become the wave of the future, the smart route is to train providers about not talking to the driver about these kinds of matters.” 

Another not-so-obvious issue, Maier said, is the existence of anti-kickback provisions that levy civil, often hefty, monetary fines for fraud and abuse on health care providers that offer free transportation to Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare beneficiaries.

Such an issue can be addressed, however, by observing various safeguards that the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services included in guidelines about ride-hailing services it issued a couple of years ago.

Maier said that employers can do so by making clear that the free Uber rides are incidental benefits to use of Grand Rounds' services.

“The biggest thing they would want to [ensure] is that the [free ride] is not the draw but is something that is offered to employees once they are already using Grand Rounds,” she said.

Keith Frank, a partner at Long Island, New York-based Moritt Hock & Hamroff, said issues could also arise if there were a vehicle accident en route to an appointment or the driver allegedly engaged in wrongful conduct toward the patient-passenger. For that reason, employers should ensure that there are contracts in place to protect them from claims against the company. 

But Frank added he sees potential problems with the larger issue of any third party—in this case, Grand Rounds and Uber—injecting itself into the employer-employee relationship, namely the risk that employers somehow learn of employees' medical conditions, knowledge that could be used against the company in disability discrimination lawsuits. 

“This opens up a Pandora's box if not properly managed,” he said. “There have to be checks in place if employers want to go down this road. There are risks and liabilities that employers could be taking on that they didn't have before.”