By Matt Goodman From D CEO October 2015
From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Jonathan Clarke served in the U.S. Navy as an emergency physician. He had loose orders to be in the clinic for at least half of the total hours he spent working. But that’s tough to pull off when a sailor gouges his or her forehead on the stabilizer of an F-18, or when an entire crew needs smallpox vaccinations in the field.
“My primary job as a physician was to practice completely outside of a traditional healthcare environment,” Clarke says from his office in Dallas’ West End. “I was with them wherever they were, whether we were in a hangar or we were on deck in the desert out in California or in Arizona or we were doing an exercise in the Netherlands or Denmark.”
When he returned stateside, his office hours at the hospital felt cramped. So, yes, Clarke practices freelance emergency medicine at busy ERs and trauma centers across Dallas-Fort Worth. But he’ll also practice at your home. Or your workplace. You can summon the 39-year-old, his two other physicians, or his seven nurse practitioners and physician assistants using the smartphone app he came up with last year, called Mend.
The simple way to describe it is Uber for urgent care, taking the patient experience from the physician’s office to wherever the patient happens to be. But more complex is the fact that Clarke and his entrepreneurial ilk are part of a trend that will only become more prevalent as America dives deeper into a post-Affordable Care Act world.
Companies like Mend and Plano’s PediaQ, wherein a parent can use an app to direct a nurse practitioner to wherever their sick child is, are evidence that healthcare is welcoming a more consumer-driven model. Lean, efficient upstarts are identifying gaps that can be exploited to improve convenience and transparency in the care patients receive. The giants are no longer the only game in town.
“You could literally be the Uptown and the downtown doctor,” Clarke says. “That’s your beat.”
“Entrepreneurs are looking and seeing that there’s no consumer convenience: you wait and wait and wait and your doctor isn’t in the office, or the ER wait is hours,” says Dr. David Albert, a serial entrepreneur who splits his time between Oklahoma City and San Francisco. He’s founded several companies, including Data Critical, an analytics business specializing in the critical care sector that went public in 1999 and was acquired by GE in 2001. “There is obviously an opportunity,” Albert says.
SOURCE: http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-ceo/2015/october/urgent-healthcare-smartphone-services
