St. Thomas business faculty help to create medical transportation software


Graphics from a video describing Hitch Health explaining how the app works. St. Thomas School of Business faculty members partnered with Lyft and the Hennepin County Medical Center in 2017 to design a software that provides transportation to medical appointments for patients in need. (Courtesy of Hitch Health)

St. Thomas School of Business faculty members partnered with Lyft and the Hennepin County Medical Center in 2017 to design a software that provides transportation to medical appointments for patients in need.

The software, called Hitch Health, was created as a response to patient no show rates reaching 20%. These no show rates cost HCMC millions of dollars, prompting Upstream Health Innovations to investigate ways for lower-income patients to engage in their health care needs.

“The people at Hitch did use a technique called human centered design, which was to go out and talk to the patients and travel around with them and figure out why they weren’t finding rides,” Daniel McLaughlin Director of the Center for Innovation in St. Thomas’ Business of Health Care said.

When a patient schedules an appointment in the Minneapolis area, online medical records are sent to the server where Hitch Health determines if a patient is eligible for a ride based on income, mental state and insurance. If eligible, patients are sent driver information. Patients then meet their ride, head to their appointment and text “ready” when finished to alert the driver that a pickup is requested.

Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship John McVea is hopeful for the future of Hitch Health.

“It can provide better care to poor or disadvantaged patients who miss appointments because of transportation,” McVea said.

McVea and McLaughlin co-wrote the Hitch Health case study, which was published in the academic catalog Harvard Business Publishing and implemented into St. Thomas classes like Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

First-year business student Betsy Schoenwetter learned how human centered design helped her developing entrepreneurial skills.

“It’s certainly helped me develop my information gathering and listening skills. My professor, John McVea, emphasized letting silence sit for five or ten seconds because this is when people often say the most insightful things. The other part of our human centered design project that’s helped my entrepreneurial skills is the brainstorming part of it,” Schoenwetter said.

In McVea’s class, students were paired and asked, “How can we help college students to be more mentally and physically healthy during COVID-19?”

Schoenwetter listened to her partner’s complaint about being an introvert in a global pandemic. In the span of two minutes, Schoenwetter’s job was to come up with five product and service prototypes to aid her partner in a successful way.

“We did the human centered design ourselves,” said Schoenwetter.

Josie Morss can be reached at mors7544@stthomas.edu.