Uber's Tech for Prescription Delivery

Uber’s mission is to create opportunities through movement. By changing how people, food, and things move through cities, Uber is a platform that opens up the world to new possibilities, and now, the Hyderabad-based Uber Eats Engineering team led the integration of prescription delivery company NimbleRx’s backend onto the Uber Eats platform to help launch one of the company’s latest products, delivery of prescription medicines, in parts of the United States of America late last year.

Known to be pioneers of creating opportunities, this too was done in record time. The team completed the integration process in just three weeks, thereby allowing customers to order their prescription medication from neighbourhood pharmacies or transfer their existing prescription right from their Uber Eats app. The partnership leverages Uber Eats’ delivery expertise and ensures medicines reach residents in a timely manner, all at the tap of a button on your smartphones.

With COVID-19 vaccines in various stages of rollout across the US, delivery of medicines continues to be a crucial service, helping people stay protected indoors. The team that worked on this integration comprises a total of five engineers, including Android and iOS engineers, a web engineer, a backend engineer, and an engineering manager.

Jaiteerth Patwari, Site Lead, Eats Engineering said, “This backend integration is an example of our tech centres in India building for the world. Given the high priority, we place on the safety and convenience of customers, our teams worked at lightning speed to develop a solution for aiding the on-demand delivery of medicines for those in need.‘’

The Eats Engineering team works on a global mandate and serves key markets such as the United States, Canada, Belgium, and Japan. The team has led several projects where they’ve made food and medicines more accessible to people in these countries. Apart from prescription delivery, the Uber Eats Engineering team has also enabled contactless food delivery across several countries - something that’s been used widely in times of the pandemic. Additionally, it has uploaded menus of restaurants by leveraging machine learning. These interventions assumed greater significance through the pandemic, when people across the world couldn’t step out and needed food delivered to their homes… safely, and on time!