PayPal Holdings, Inc. has become a part of Uber Technologies, Inc.‘s initiative to offer free or discounted trips to inoculation sites in the United States to help ensure that transportation isn’t a barrier to vaccine access, according to a Friday (Feb. 26) announcement.
“Over the past year, we have deployed our products, services and resources to help our customers and communities navigate the impacts of the pandemic,” PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said in the announcement. “We are proud to join forces with Uber to extend these efforts to ensure that transportation is not a barrier to vaccine access, especially for those in under-resourced communities.”
Last December, Uber committed as many as 10 million free or discounted rides to make sure transportation doesn’t prevent people from getting vaccines. To help with the effort, PayPal is making a corporate contribution of $5 million to fund more rides. The company will also work with Uber to explore ways to leverage its “giving platform” to encourage individual contributions to the vaccine access initiative.
“Nobody should miss their shot at getting vaccinated because they lack transportation,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the announcement. “PayPal’s generous donation and support will go a long way to accelerate our efforts to ensure equitable access to vaccination, and we are excited to partner with them in the critically important months ahead.”
The collaboration is an extension of PayPal’s efforts to help underserved communities throughout the country, which have been most impacted by the pandemic. As part of those initiatives, PayPal provided minority and women-owned companies with access to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. In addition, it committed $535 million to support Black and minority-owned companies and communities in the United States.
On Dec. 9, PayPal Holdings, Inc. said that it processed a record-breaking $185 million globally on GivingTuesday, which was the most raised on its platform for the global day of giving since the event’s launch in 2012.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has formed an artificial intelligence (AI)-centric health partnership with General Catalyst.
AWS says the collaboration, announced Monday (Jan. 13), combines its tech expertise with General Catalyst’s history of healthcare investments.
“AWS and General Catalyst believe that AI has immense potential to [effect] meaningful change in global health care,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a news release. “Together, we are taking bold steps to improve patient outcomes and make quality care more accessible to all by embedding AI throughout the care journey.”
According to the release, the partnership will focus on building and deploying AI-powered solutions to address crucial needs in predictive and personalized care, interoperability, operational and clinical efficiency, diagnostics and patient engagement.
The potential here is “vast,” the companies said, with plans to employ the power of generative AI using Amazon Bedrock and team with providers like Anthropic and Mistral AI as well as securely trained health care-specific models.
“One example is the ability to drive more personalized health care by using disease-specific models that process diverse health data—such as radiology and pathology scans, genomic sequencing information, clinical trial data, and electronic health records—to help doctors and researchers identify patterns and diagnose, make predictions about treatment outcomes, offer insights into disease progression, and more,” the release said.
Writing Monday about the intersection between generative AI (GenAI) and healthcare, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster posited a world in which “your doctor knows you’re getting sick before you do” and healthcare is more of a “proactive partnership” than a thing to worry about.
“GenAI has the potential to shift the conversation — and time and dollars spent — from how much it costs to make people well when they get sick to preventing illness before it even begins,” Webster wrote. “That will make the future of healthcare about using GenAI to better understand and prevent disease. Interactions with the patient will become patient-first and smart-technology driven.”
The economics, that report adds, are “compelling,” as U.S. healthcare costs — which came to nearly $5 trillion in 2023 — are projected to reach $7.7 trillion by 2032. Many consumers, especially younger ones, say they’ll skip or delay medical care because they can’t afford it.
“That’s not just expensive — it’s unsustainable,” Webster wrote.
“By using intelligent monitoring devices and personalized health insights, it’s possible to dramatically reduce the cost of chronic disease management. Medication can be remotely prescribed, administered and monitored as appropriate, staving off a full-blown, expensive and potentially physically debilitating medical crisis.”
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