#1: Dr. Renee Dua: Co-Founder of Heal and heyRenee on Building Impactful Companies to Redefine Healthcare in America

Start Yourself Up

Dr. Renee Dua is a visionary physician-entrepreneur who is the co-founder of two innovative companies; Heal and heyRenee. Renee is a board-certified nephrologist and served as the Chief of Medicine at two of LAs largest hospitals. As she spent more time as a doctor, she became more and more frustrated with the outdated health care system here in the US, and after one difficult trip to the ER with her son her frustration turned into an idea and she partnered with her husband to create ‘Heal’, a company that provides on-demand house calls from doctors where board-certified doctors visit patients in their homes to provide the same services you'd find in a normal doctor's office. As Chief Medical Officer of Heal, she oversaw the successful delivery of over 300,000 doctor house calls. She went from literally going home-to-home delivering house calls to patients in need to building a team of 200+ medical teams who saw over 2,000 patients per week across the United States. Heal also recently raised their Series D round, with an investment of $100 MM from Humana to further expand their mission.
She created HeyRenee in June 2021 and quickly raised $3.8MM in seed funding to be the indispensable “best friend” that helps underserved, chronic disease patients, follow their doctor’s care plan towards living happier, healthier lives.
Renee won the CES Innovation Award and was instrumental in working with CMS to expand house calls to all seniors and in driving strategy for Heal’s clinical and patient-facing products. Driven by the belief that great healthcare is a human right, Renee has always gone beyond the call of duty to give the greatest care to the neediest patients.

Finally, she is the mother of three young children, who are her pride and joy. In her rare free time, she cooks and takes long drives in her EV with her best friend and husband, Nick Desai.

In this episode, we talk about the early days that set her up to start two companies as a co-founder, we talk about how both her companies are instilling accessibility, transparency, and redefining the doctor-patient relationship to fix the broken healthcare system in the US, and lastly, the challenges she had to overcome in building Heal and also the lessons she is has learned the way.

Check out heal in the app store and on https://heal.com/

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