This app is bringing back doctor housecalls



Few things are worse than sitting in an emergency room or walk-in clinic while you wait for an available doctor.

The wait can sometimes last for hours, and when you finally are seen it’s often a cursory examination. That’s what prompted entrepreneur Nick Desai and his wife, Dr. Renee Dua, to launch Heal, a Southern California-based business with an app that provides on-demand doctor house calls.

Heal offers on-demand doctor house calls

When someone accesses the app at getheal.com a doctor will be sent to their home within two hours. The service is available 12 hours a day, 365 days year. And Heal physicians can address everything from a sore throat or urinary tract infection to allergies, the flu and sports injuries.

“We offer preventive, primary and urgent care that is non-acute,” Desai said. “Anything that can happen in a doctor’s office we can do at your home.”

Desai recalls the moment when the idea for Heal was born.

“We had taken our son to the ER and we ended up waiting for seven hours,” he said. “My wife finally turned to me and said, ‘Why not bring back house calls?’ ”

Why not, indeed.

More than 11,000 Californians have used the service

The Heal business model harkens back to the days when doctors routinely visited patients in their homes, and it has resonated with California consumers. Heal has already served more than 11,000 patients since it was founded in May 2015 and the company is looking to expand its service to other states next year.

Desai knows a thing or two about how to grow a business. He has launched and led four venture-funded startups over the last 18 years that addressed technology-enabled fitness and weight loss, social media and mobile applications, and the web’s first self-updating address book.

Desai is Heal’s CEO and Dua serves as the company’s co-founder chief medical officer.

“We have about 65 physicians,” Desai said. “We have pediatric, internal medicine and family doctors and they absolutely love it. It’s life-changing for them because the doctors get to spend more time with their patients and there’s less bureaucracy and paperwork involved.”

The trend of gaining quicker access to medical care is gaining momentum, as the average wait time to see a doctor through the traditional appointment process is about three weeks.

“My initial reaction is it’s about time,” said USC health economist Glenn Melnick. “This program looks like more of a convenience model, and the healthcare system in this country is not designed for customer convenience at all. We have a long way to go.”

Flu shots are offered for $30 and a patient’s insurance often covers the full cost

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Heal is currently offering flu shots for $30 and the shots are free when they are covered by a patient’s existing health insurance, which is often the case. A wide range of other services are also mostly covered by a patient’s medical insurance.

“When you put in your insurance information we’ll tell you right up front how much it will cost,” Desai said. “Sometimes all of it will be covered and other times you’ll pay whatever deductible you have, like $20 or $40. But you never pay more than $99.”

Rebecca Baron had a Heal doctor stop by her Malibu home on Wednesday to give a flu shot to her 20-month-old daughter, Gabriella.

“It was wonderful,” she said. “This is the second time we’ve used the service. When you have small children you worry about going to a doctor’s office and getting them exposed to germs when you’re there. This was great for us because after the doctor left we were able to eat lunch, put her down for a nap and continue with our routine. And we didn’t have to sit around in a waiting room.”

Baron said she only paid $30 for the flu shot. And their co-pay for the last doctor visit when her husband was feeling ill was just $19.

“That’s less than we’d pay at the doctor’s office,” she said.

The process also pencils out financially for the physicians.

Desai said his doctors make as much as they would working at a traditional medical office because of the inefficiencies that are addressed.

“When a doctor is working at a large medical office they’ll see about 40 patients a day,” he said. “But they also have to spend part of their time doing billing, charting and other things for which they are not paid. But when our doctors go out on calls they are driven by a medical assistant. And they have a tablet with them so they can do those kinds of things electronically between calls. So at the end of the day, they’re done.”

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