Heal, Digitizing Primary Care Visits
Courtesy of Heal
Heal, the Los Angeles-based telehealth company founded in 2014, offers consumers in-person house and telemedicine calls with licensed doctors, all in a cost-effective approach that cuts costs by 65 percent. From its app or website, Heal allows anybody to schedule a telemedicine call and is either covered by insurance or costs $79 out of pocket. From there, doctors can order labs, write prescriptions, and refer patients to specialists, all from the comfort of their own homes.
Telemedicine may be the biggest breakout star this year: During the first quarter of 2020 alone, the number of telehealth visits increased by 50 percent, compared with the same period in 2019, according to the CDC. Continuing on this trend, the global telemedicine market size can expect to reach about 186 billion by 2026. The growth happened with good reason: digitization of the “doctors visit” is not only convenient, but minimizes the contact to germs and viruses, which proved especially relevant this year.
Heal was recently named a winner among Inc.’s Best in Business 2020 and is now nominated for the Top 50 in Digital Health in the Digital Health Growing Startup to Watch category.
We sat down with Heal CEO and cofounder Nick Desai to chat about how exactly their services work, their goal to be a primary care provider and allow patients to build a relationship with the same doctor for years to come, and what the future of telemedicine may look like.
Hi Gray: Thanks for chatting. Can you tell me about both the inspiration as well as the consumer demand that drove the creation of Heal?
Nick Desai: We created Heal after a terrifying ordeal of sitting with our sick infant in an ER waiting room for seven hours one Friday night. On our ride home, we realized there has to be a better way to provide timely access to quality care, which is a universal need. In fact, nearly four out of every five visits to the ER are not emergencies — it is just people needing medical care and doctors’ offices being closed.
Our innovation is to bring your family doctor back to your family room — to deliver quality, timely, affordable healthcare in the privacy and safety of your own home. It turns out that in-home primary care (a.k.a. doctor house calls) does not require us to charge the patient more because there is so much waste, inefficiency and bureaucracy in the delivery of health care in a traditional office setting. We automated that entire process with patient and provider friendly innovations that eliminate all the friction in health care and reduce costs by 65 percent …