Bridge

Imagine this: waiting four days just to find a taxi.

For medical social workers, this isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a daily reality when arranging transport for patients in need.

Finding medical transport: An administrative nightmare

Healthcare providers like medical social workers (MSWs) spend excessive time coordinating medical transport for patients.

The process requires multiple emails and calls to find an available provider, coordinate patient discharge date and time, manage rescheduling and update funding approvals. For renal patients requiring recurring transport, this can take up to four days per patient.

🤯 81% of MSWs found transport coordination mentally taxing*

The lengthy, back-and-forth coordination creates a significant mental burden on MSWs, forcing them to repeatedly revisit cases to ensure transport arrangements are secured.

Throughout the process, MSWs experience constant uncertainty about whether transport can be secured in time. Delays can impact funding approvals, affect patient discharge and slow down bed turnover rates. On top of that, frequent changes in patient condition and unexpected updates from the medical team make it even harder to coordinate timely medical transport.

*From a survey conducted among 21 medical social workers working with renal patients

Our vision: Get medical transport in minutes, not days

Bridge connects healthcare providers with medical transport providers across Singapore, on demand. By consolidating all medical transport jobs onto a single platform, Bridge makes it easy for both healthcare and transport providers to track, confirm, and manage requests in one place.

Find medical transport in three easy steps:

1. Post: Submit patient transport details in seconds

2. Receive: Get applications from medical transport providers across Singapore

3. Choose: Choose the best option based on availability and patient needs

A transport request posted for a renal patient

Current product focus: servicing recurring trips for renal patients

Medical transport requests fall into two categories:

1. Single trip: one-time transport for medical appointments

2. Recurring trips: ongoing transport for long-term treatment

The team decided to prioritise recurring trips, specifically securing reliable transport for renal patients traveling to and from dialysis centers so Bridge can deliver the greatest impact for both patients and MSWs in the shortest amount of time.

What testers say

Throughout the development of Bridge, the team conducted extensive user discovery and user testing with medical social workers and transport providers. Here's what they have to say about Bridge:

📩 Bridge minimises back-and-forth communication

"With this system, it makes my life easier because I won't have so many email threads and correspondence to keep track of. I can just put up the request here."

~ Medical social worker, Woodlands Health

⏳ Bridge reduces time taken to secure transport

"I can save a lot of time with this job board because I can quickly cross reference with my vehicle availability to check if I can accept the job."

~ Operations manager, Transport provider company

🏥 Bridge improves patient access to care

"This is very important because it concerns the turnover rate of beds in hospitals in Singapore"

~ Head of Operations, Transport provider company

Bridging the gap in Singapore's medical transport capacity

Currently, demand for medical transport exceeds supply in Singapore. Bridge enables more patients to get the transport they need, when they need it by:

👀 Increasing transport request visibility

Bridge gets every patient transport request seen by more providers, so patients get a ride as soon as possible.

📞 Reducing administrative overhead

Less time spent on calls and emails means transport providers can redirect resources to expanding their fleet, and healthcare providers can refocus on supporting patients on the rest of their healthcare journeys.

🚑 Maximising capacity of existing vehicles

By supporting transport providers to make full use of their vehicles, Bridge enables them to take on more jobs per vehicle and better meet demand.

What's next

Meet the team

The Bridge team and our lovely medical social worker partners 💗

Si Mun Tham | Rayner Loh | Amanda Tan | Tracy Hung | Tan Jue Ling | Wenjia Dong | Petrina Yeow