Dan Trigub, MedArrive Co-Founder and CEO & Former Head of Uber Health joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss why its important to make affordable at-home care the new norm.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: These are some really sobering numbers that we have gotten over the last 24 hours. More than 100,000 people hospitalized on Wednesday. That is nearly double the high point, the peak that we reached in spring. The largest death toll ever in a day, 2,760 people. And CDC director Robert Redfield warning that 450,000 Americans may die by February if we continue at this rate.

I want to bring in Dan Trigub. He is the former head of Uber Health. He is joining us today to talk about the launch of his new company MedArrive. He is a Co-Founder and CEO there. Dan, this is certainly a timely discussion to be had, and we want to get to your new venture in just a bit. But I want to get a sense of how you are viewing all of these dynamics at play right now in the health-care space. As somebody who is very familiar with the growth that we have seen on the other end of this virus with telehealth, with remote health, how are you looking at the huge uptick right now in the virus itself and the ability for health-care workers to be able to control this?

DAN TRIGUB: Akiko, thank you for having me today. And I think we're, you know, in an unprecedented time, as many of us are saying right now. And I think from our perspective, from my perspective at MedArrive and my background working at Uber Health, I truly believe the next breakthrough in health care is not going to be necessarily genetics or therapeutics. It's going to be how care is delivered in this country, and we need to find-- we need to find more innovative ways to bring care into the home, the home being the hub of health care of the future.

And when we think about delivering the vaccination, we can't overburden our health systems, our hospitals. We have to find innovative ways to bring care into that home environment, and that's really what is at the core of our mission and what we're doing.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting time when we talk about telehealth getting so much of the attention here, but clearly there are constraints in how much telehealth can do, especially when we're talking about rolling out a vaccine that's going to require in-person care. You guys are tapping into a network of more than 20,000 EMTs here. Talk to me about how that might be a huge boost when we discuss constraints for health-care workers, hospital staff, especially when we have so many beds now in the ICU dedicated to caring for patients.

DAN TRIGUB: Yeah, we have to find these new, innovative approaches. Telemedicine can't do everything. I mean, with the tailwind of the pandemic, telemedicine has been growing rapidly. But as we like to say-- as we say at MedArrive, there's no humanity, no physical touch in telemedicine. It's just a digital screen.

We hear from doctors and physicians they love telemedicine because sometimes they can just look over the shoulder of their patient and see what's going on in the home, but there is no physical contact there. They can't physically be in the home.

And for us, we believe EMS, EMTs, and paramedics are one of the most underutilized workforces in health care, and we can be that physical contact for that physician, for the health system in the home leveraging this workforce and still use telemedicine to really be the eyes, hands, the physical touch in the home on behalf of our partners.

AKIKO FUJITA: Dan, what do you see as the potential? If we're talking numbers here, what do you see as the potential for telehealth, and to what extent do you think the pandemic has accelerated the growth?

DAN TRIGUB: Well, it has absolutely accelerated the growth, and we've seen staggering growth in terms of the amount of telehealth visits that are happening. Now that said, the data shows that close to 30% of the population doesn't always necessarily trust telemedicine. And again, it's just a physical screen. There is no contact there.

And what we believe is we need to find a bridge. We need to find a bridge between pure telemedicine and that physical contact, and that's at the core of what we're doing at MedArrive.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I like the concept here of, you know, for someone who's outside of the sector looking in at it who might think that, by your point, that EMTs could have some time here in the downtime. How does it work structurally? How would you want to leverage that workforce here if they are supposed to be out there for emergencies? I imagine they would have to be distracted from helping patients, shifting back into emergency settings. So how might that actually work?

DAN TRIGUB: Yeah, for us-- first, to step back for a second, we think this is one of the most underutilized, undertapped resources in health care. EMTs and paramedics are everywhere. They're in rural markets today just as much as in large metros.

The other thing is they're highly underutilized. The typical EMT/paramedic works three 12-hour shifts a week. They have extra days in that work week, and they're highly skilled and scoped to do a variety of services.

So what we're doing at scale for the first time is efficiently aggregating this labor force by partnering with local EMS agencies and national EMS companies where we get that dedicated supply on our platform when they're not on the job, when they're not on the clock for their day job driving an ambulance or going into the communities that they serve. They're using their own vehicles. They're off the clock, and they're on the MedArrive platform through this partnership-driven approach that we've built out.

So it's really about accessing this labor force efficiently and a labor force that knows the community, knows the local folks who live in the communities they serve, and a great opportunity for us to tap into that.

AKIKO FUJITA: Dan, to what extent do you see MedArrive expanding its services beyond medical care? I know when you were at Uber Health, you were looking at, for example, food delivery for recovering patients as a way to sort of connect all the platforms that were within the Uber ecosystem. You've got MedArrive right now, and I know the focus is on EMTs, but what's your grand vision here? Do you see being able to connect the dots beyond just simply medical services?

DAN TRIGUB: Yeah, absolutely. This is just the beginning for us. We can tap into a vast array of labor and different forms of services into the home once we've built out our platform.

Just to be clear, at the core of it, we're a software as a service. We're infrastructure. We're the glue connecting patients and health-plan members to this efficient workforce through and by their health plan or their health-care provider.

So we're really building partnerships, more of a B2B approach. So we're not trying to have people come directly to us. We partner with a Medicare Advantage plan, a Medicaid plan, and we become that extension into the home.

And certainly once we're in the home, there's a variety of services we can do. We're starting with EMS labor for a variety of reasons, but the future is endless in terms of the services we can feed through this platform as we begin to scale.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, it's very interesting stuff there. The CEO and co-founder of MedArrive. Dan, Thanks so much for joining us today.