INTERVIEW WITH THE CEO AND FOUNDER OF HEALIS HEALTH

Written by Elizabeth Egan

Tell me a little bit about how you got into medicine and what that process of becoming a doctor looked like for you?

So I am a family medicine doctor. I am a person who was always very passionate about medicine and wanted to go into it from a young age. I am the first doctor in my family. So as I went through that experience, I experienced a lot of disillusionment with the medical system as it is. I think that very much speaks to the experience of a lot of the doctors who are in the group. A lot of that came from the moral injury of working in a system that was pretty toxic for ourselves. One that didn’t actually address the root causes of our patients’ problems.

Essentially, after residency, I needed to heal from that experience, so I moved abroad to Israel. My intention was to stay a few months so I could take some time off. It turned out I needed a lot more time off than I thought, and I ended up staying, so we have been here almost 8 years.

Working as an ex-pat physician, I found the positions were very unstable. You didn’t really have a way to negotiate rates, and the pay was very low. In general, I didn’t feel empowered to connect with patients and treat them the way they should have been treated. There was always some system dictating how you could practice medicine. How long had you been with the patient, system dictating how you could practice medicine? How long you had with the patient, what kind of medicine you could prescribe, or what you are allowed to talk about, etc.

In 2020, I had friends in the States saying they had to get out of here. People wanted to live near their parents because they worried about them, or they needed childcare. Doctors found that they were totally locked in because their patient panel was there, or their job had a non-compete. A  lot of people reached out to me to ask how I made becoming an expat work, and I said, “not very well”. I said to one of my friends What if we started our own business where we had our own practice that we could control? We could do what all the other telemedicine companies do, where we bring in our own panels and work on those together. I put it on Facebook, and suddenly, there were 100 doctors who responded, saying they needed that same situation. That is when I realized there was a need, and I didn’t want to leave everybody in the same lurch that I have been in for the last 7 years.

I knew that there must be power in this group, in this number of people who are dissatisfied with the way that medicine has become. We decided to form a collaborative company. People will invest money, and we will use it for group insurance and to cover all the costs needed to allow every doctor to have their own practice. That was how this project got started.

What inspired you to create Healis Health?

I was working for a telemedicine company at the time that I liked; I would have been happy to stay with them. However, they started cutting rates after I had been there for a number of years. They started filling all the physician-held positions with mid-level providers.

It was just a demoralizing moment because you expect loyalty after years of working in a place. Patients come because of word of mouth or because I am their doctor, and they have a relationship with me, and they refer their friends to me. I am the one creating value for the company, and yet they don’t see that. They just see the bottom line.

It was really at that point that I realized no matter where I am and if I love it, if it is not run by physicians with the patients at the center, there is going to be a profit motive that will be forever interfering with my life and the life of the patient.

What are the differences between practicing medicine in person vs through telemedicine?

There was recently a survey by the AMA that said 80% of complaints can be addressed through telemedicine. In my experience, I would say that is correct.

Most of the decision-making process about what to do with a patient has to do with their story. It also depends on what they tell you is going on, and a little bit on how they look. There are subtleties to that that you don’t even realize until you have practiced for a long time. People’s color, or how bright their eyes are, or how they hold themselves. There are just a few little things that can help you to diagnose them. You can capture that in telemedicine, so the essentials are there to practice good medicine. You have about 20% that you just really need a physical exam for, so that is where in-person referrals become necessary. Otherwise, I think practicing telemedicine is really the same or maybe better. When I sit with someone, I can see their home environment. When you pluck someone out of their home environment and into a sterile clinic, you get a different view of them.

People sometimes act when they go to the doctor, and they try to act as well as they can. At home, you can see what is on their walls, if there are children running around, and if there is mold. You just get a sense of how they live, and that is a huge piece of information that we miss in the clinic. So yes, I think that practicing telemedicine can be better for a lot of things, and then obviously for other things, you do just need that physical exam.

What has been your biggest challenge in creating Healis Health?

What has been really easy is getting doctors. We have not advertised at all, and we are very honest and transparent with everyone about where we are in creating the company. Despite it being a young company and not having regular income flow or stability, we have new signups of doctors every day because medicine so desperately needs this transformation. The doctors need to be re-empowered, especially after the last couple of years, when practicing medicine has become so toxic. I think this is the moment that doctors are ready to come together and create change, and that is essentially what we are doing.

The hard part has been reaching patients because the world is really big, and in general, the way that is done is taking on massive investments from corporations and pouring money into advertising.

We have decided not to go the route of taking corporate financing. We have had to build the practices organically, which means reaching out to people individually and explaining to them what they can get through the business. That is slow and time-consuming, and it has gotten us some of the way in the sense that doctors do have small panels of patients. However, it hasn’t been enough to really build the business. We are looking at other ways of reaching big groups of patients that need care and reaching them in that way.

What would be your highest goal for the company?

My highest goal for the company is to have every doctor have as many patients as they want because that enables us to create freedom for doctors. There are so many who struggle to balance their home and work life. Doctors who struggle with things such as mental health and chronic illness shouldn’t be leaving the workforce entirely because they are great doctors and can expand the pool of people who have access to quality care. In reality, although it is to work in a fast-paced clinic, there are some doctors who want to work full-time, and I would love it if their panels become full.

A lot of people just want this as a side project to make money or to be able to work part-time to get a better balance in life. I think that is so critical because we have all had doctors who are rushed or don’t listen or who are just not compassionate with us. I think that has a lot to do with all the other things going on in their head and the burnout and pressure they experience. If we could somehow alleviate that, it would ultimately make for better care.

What is something you would say to a patient to tell them why they should become a part of your practice?

We have talked about that a million times, and the challenging thing about that is that each doctor has their own practice, and they offer different things. What I would say is I think there is a doctor out there for every patient. There are some people who are very holistic and want more natural solutions, but live in a place where they don’t have access to them. Here, people can find a doctor who sees eye to eye and will treat them the way they want to be treated.

Similarly, you have patients who have very highly specialized problems, and their nearest specialist is booked for months or is far from their home. They can access an incredibly well-trained specialist within a week or even in a day through telemedicine. In general, we are trying to break down the barriers between patients and doctors. One of the hard parts has been articulating what barriers we are trying to break because it is different for each person.

We are trying to restore people’s access to doctors they would want to talk to. Someone you choose who will listen to you. We want to restore that part of medicine where you sit down with your doctor. Ultimately, we want to see patients connected to care in a way they otherwise would not have been able to.