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Heal, an App to cure your Cold or Flu by sending the Doc to your place.

What do you do if you’re a one car fam­i­ly, your spouse is on a busi­ness trip with the Tes­la and you need some­one to look at lit­tle Bil­ly, soon­er than lat­er? What do you think about the idea of using an app called Heal to get real med­ical help from a neigh­bor­hood or close-by doc­tor? Vis­it­ing doc­tors is noth­ing new but Heal wants it to become far more com­mon place.

Heal from Los Ange­les is remak­ing old-fash­ioned house vis­its by offer­ing an on-demand ser­vice promis­ing a doc­tor in under an hour. The ser­vice had start­ed in LA last year and is now avail­able in San Fran­cis­co. There are plen­ty of new start-ups that are offer­ing telep­res­ence ser­vice, mean­ing you can talk with a doc­tor over a skype like sys­tem, but for some, they want a doc­tor they touch and to inspect a sit­u­a­tion first hand. Heal sends that tra­di­tion­al med­ical doc­tor, com­plete with black bag, stetho­scope and oth­er portable, hi-tech gadgets.

Heal founder Dr. Renee Dua, a board cer­ti­fied kid­ney spe­cial­ist had a per­son­al sit­u­a­tion which had her sick son sit­ting in an ER room overnight because the right doc­tor wasn’t avail­able. “It was awful. When your kid is sick you need a sim­ple way to get a doc­tor fast.” The ser­vice is very easy to under­stand, it will search for a qual­i­fied doc­tor around you and bring them over to your loca­tion in under an hour. For some cas­es this could be a light­ning expe­ri­ence com­pared to wait­ing in a clin­ic or a hospital.

Dr. Dua real­ized that doc­tors already have all the avail­able tools at hand to han­dle a cold or flu, “You’d be sur­prised what we have these days,” gad­gets like the Aliv­Cor ECG, a heart rate mon­i­tor that hooks up to your smart­phone for read­ings, and the CellScope, a tool that came out of UC Berke­ley that turns the cam­era of your smart­phone or tablet into a high-qual­i­ty light micro­scope. Heal has raised $3.7 mil­lion in seed mon­ey so far, and Dr. Dua plans to use the mon­ey to expand Heal beyond L.A. and the Bay Area in the near future. To start you need to down­load the iOS Heal app (Android com­ing soon) and then offer­ing doc­tor ser­vices between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., sev­en days a week. A doc­tor should come to your door with­in 60 minutes.

The truth is it’s not an orig­i­nal idea, in North Car­oli­na there’s Doc­tors Mak­ing House­calls. Then in New York City there’s start-up Pager. Also in LA, Med­icast which works with hos­pi­tals and estab­lished physi­cian prac­tices to pro­vide sched­uled house calls to patients. So what is Heal charg­ing for the ser­vice? A sin­gle vis­it will cost $99 which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than if you were to take your­self to a doc­tor but Dr. Dua points out that you should also take into con­sid­er­a­tion the time, gas mon­ey and park­ing you may have to pay to do so.

Dr. Dua said she’s work­ing on a “hyper-local­ized” appli­ca­tion so that doc­tors are clos­er to patients in the same way Uber dri­vers pick up rides with­in a cer­tain area close to them. Heal offers a ser­vice that will go and pick up your med­ica­tion, vit­a­mins and what­ev­er else you need at the phar­ma­cy for you. Even­tu­al­ly Heal will be able to offer oth­er things like vac­ci­na­tions and ultra­sound on-demand. They now have a doc­tor close to every neigh­bor­hood in L.A. now. If you’ve ever had an inter­est in med­i­cine maybe you might want to see how you can apply your media back­ground to help­ing people?