Hello Health— pioneering online care

Hello Health, founded in 2008, built primary care practices designed to deliver care primarily online and supplemented by our brick and mortar clinics. Patients could join our practice for a membership fee and use their insurance for in-person visits. We built our clinics in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the West Village in Manhattan, and on corporate campuses for clients like Qualcomm. Nat Findlay, a serial entrepreneur, approached me after visiting my first practice’s website and suggested that we should professionalize the spirit of my house call practice. We dove in head first, together, trying to fix healthcare. Our investors were primarily high net worth individuals— founders of 24 Hour Fitness, Cirque de Soleil, Crocs, and a few others.

Hello Health— pioneering online care

Brick & mortar meets online

One of the first direct primary care practices

The launch

We announced our launch in the NYC Subways with ads designed to generate wonder and engage the community:

We were thrilled. But the NYC Subway was not. They told us we have to take the ads down because they encourage graffiti. We called up the local news outlets and said we were being unfairly sensored. The NYC nightly news covered the story generating tens of thousands of hits on our site. In the end, we replaced the ads with this:

We built our own platform

We built our own platform from the ground up because, in 2008, cloud-based EMRs were just getting started and we knew platforms built for in-person care couldn’t power primarily online care. Founded around the same time as One Medical, we were one of the first tech-enabled, human-powered services in healthcare. These are screenshots from the first version of our platform:

Along the way, the press took notice

"Sick of the Washington debate? Try Hello Health, a system in which you shop for first-rate medical care the way you buy books on Amazon."

—Esquire Magazine

"The Doctor of the Future."

—Fast Company

"Technodoc Jay Parkinson Says Hello to Franchising"

—Wall Street Journal

If you want a glimpse of what health care could look like a few years from now, consider “Hello Health.”

—Health Affairs

"It's slick and it's smart. You might say it's like living in the twenty-first century."

—Dr. Mehmet Oz

“Best 22 New Startups.”

—Business Insider

Hello Health ushered in the era of Hello _______ startup names. Today, there’s Hello Fresh, Hello Heart, you name it, it exists. And Hello Health, a subsidiary of Myca Health, is still alive today powering hundreds of practices across the US, the Middle East, and Australia. After getting Hello Health off the ground, it was time for my next startup, The Future Well →