It took eight hours for Renee Dua to see a doctor after she rushed her son to the emergency room last year. After a long and stressful wait, doctors told Dua her 8-month-old son was fine. She left frustrated and unsatisfied with the wasted time.
“I turned to my husband and said to him, ‘There has to be a better way to see patients. There has to be a better way for parents to get to the doctor themselves,’” she said.
Dua, who began a private nephrology practice after completing her residency at UCLA in 2003, launched a health care smartphone application in February that arranges at-home doctor visits for a flat rate of $99.
The application, called Heal, is available in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orange County. It has about 100 board-certified adult physicians pediatricians offering their services and allows users to schedule in-home appointments with certified local doctors from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily for services such as sports physicals, maternity exams and diagnoses of common illnesses such as strep throat, according to Heal’s website.
Similar in-home medical service apps have launched in other cities such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago in recent years.
Heal, however, is the first to reach Los Angeles. Every doctor arrives on site with a medical assistant and equipment, including an electronic medical record machine that can request access to a patient’s medical history with a patient’s permission, Dua said.
Dua didn’t always intend to become a doctor. Her parents, both physicians, urged her to pursue a career outside medicine so she could explore a path different from theirs. Dua applied for a position as a high school science and math teacher but refused the job, fearing she would regret turning down the opportunity to go to medical school.
Dua said she is now teaching patients in a different way, revitalizing old-fashioned physician and patient interactions during on-call doctor visits.
Dua said studying nephrology, the study of kidney disease, allowed her to integrate education into her medical career and build lasting relationships with patients who receive long-term care.
“Some (patients) have become a part of who I am,” Dua said. “When I took maternity leave, I still talked with those patients, and when I returned, I looked forward to seeing them.”
Munaf Shamji, who completed training at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center with her, said Dua always strives to improve patient care, standing out in a medical field in which many doctors become complacent in how they approach patient care.
Shamji told of one occasion in which Dua approached leaders of the medical executive committee where they worked. After only two meetings, she suggested changing management strategies that had been in place years before she began working there.
“She didn’t accept mediocrity,” said Shamji. “If she felt strongly about a particular issue she wouldn’t back down, and I think that’s the greatest trait she has.”
Dua said transitioning into the world of business was difficult because she had to face new challenges such as managing human resources and business economics, skills she wasn’t taught in medical school.
“One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Do what is right, even if it is hard,’” she said.
Nick Desai, Dua’s husband and CEO of Heal, graduated from UCLA with a master’s in electrical engineering and handles the economic side of the venture.
“No two days are alike (working at Heal),” Desai said.
Desai said factors such as the Affordable Care Act and changing insurance policies allow Heal to be relevant in the market by, for example, letting patients use their physicians for a flat fee, regardless of insurance.
Desai credits much of his work at Heal to the logical problem-solving methods he learned during his time in UCLA’s electrical engineering graduate program.
He said while his wife was the impetus for the idea to develop Heal, the work ethic he developed in the engineering program, which at some points required him to study subjects that had never been studied before, ultimately enabled him to develop their family’s experience into a business.
Dua said she still teaches every day, whether it be with her patients or with colleagues.
Nowadays, doctors are being pressured to see more and more patients and could be spending less time discussing illness prevention or management, she said. Therefore, she believes Heal changes the landscape of health care by personalizing standard checkups and allowing doctors to focus on visit quality over quantity.
Heal recently expanded services to include suture replacement and removal, joint injections and the capacity to draw labs. Within the next year, Dua said she also plans to expand services to 12 more metropolitan areas. Although she can’t release specifics, Dua said the app has exceeded its goals for customer usage.
“I’m very much in the blessed position of being able to have the ability to do a little bit of everything,” she said. “I am mother, I am a wife, I am a doctor, I am a startup entrepreneur. I found a way to meld all of my loves into one great job.”