Heal App Brings Back Old-Fashioned Doctors Who Make House Calls By ‘Ubering’ Nearby Physicians

If Uber is the app to use to get a taxi to a traveler’s doorstep, in the medical field, the newly launched app Heal is to one to tap for a patient to have a doctor visit him in his house. In effect, the app attempts to bring back the doctor of the old times who made house calls with his black bag.

Heal is the brainchild of a startup in Los Angeles founded by Dr Renee Dua, a kidney specialist. Dua got the idea for the app while waiting the whole night in the emergency room for the doctor since her infant son had a cold while there was no pediatrician available then.

“It was so awful. When your kid is sick you need a simple way to get a doctor fast,” Techcrunch quotes Dua. Being a doctor herself, she knew that technology has made it possible for physicians to bring the hospital, or at least some important equipment, to homes.

There is the AlivCor ECG which monitors heart rate by connecting it to a smartphone for the reading. Another one is the CellScope, an invention from UC Berkeley that uses the smartphone’s or tablet’s camera as a high-quality light microscope.

Heal was launched in the LA area in late 2014. On Monday, it opened for business in San Francisco. To request for a doctor who will come to a house within one hour, iPhone owners must download the iOS Heal app. The service, though, is only from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days a week. The app would soon be available in Android phones.

A similar app, Medicast, also works in the LA area. For people on Manhattan, the app they should download is Pager, while those in North Carolina could try the services of Doctors Making Housecalls.

While it may be pricier than a traditional visit to doctor’s clinics which usually costs $15 to $25, Dua points out that by factoring in the transport cost, parking fee and the time spent traveling and waiting for a doctor, the $99 fee per visit is worth it.

Besides the advantage of having a doctor within 60 minutes, Heal offers the patient more comfort. “They get the care they need, the attention that they deserve, and they’re not being exposed to other sick people in the typical waiting room,” ABC quotes Dr Maysa Alavi, one of Heal’s physicians on call.

Dua said that in the future, Heal would also provide other services such as vaccinations and ultrasound on-demand and even picking orders from the pharmacy. She also said that it would soon offer more hyper-localised doctors since there is a physician close to every neighbourhood in LA.

To contact the writer, email: v.hernandez@ibtimes.com.au