Autonomous healthcare transportation : a human-centered approach to delivering care

Millions of Americans—especially those with limited mobility, vision, cognition, and financial resources—miss or delay healthcare appointments each year due to inadequate transportation. Although there are a handful of options for non-emergency medical transportation, they are expensive, complicated to use, and often deliver a poor patient experience, especially for those who could benefit most from these services. Using human-centered design methods and building on existing research, healthcare trends, and 20 interviews with target users and subject matter experts, this paper proposes a set of speculative autonomous vehicles and service concepts to increase access to healthcare through a patient-centered experience grounded in preventative care. The goal of this paper is to provoke cities and companies to utilize autonomous vehicles to provide more convenient and cost-effective forms of NEMT to those in greatest need and serve as an early guidepost for exploring design opportunities for autonomous healthcare transportation.