#145 How to Launch Companies And Disrupt How Healthcare is Delivered ft. Dr. Renee Dua

Hey everyone. I know you're going to enjoy this episode. It's another interview with an amazing powerhouse physician entrepreneur. Her name is Dr. Renee Dua. She's one of the co founders of a company called Heal, which is an on demand mobile app. You might have heard about it if it's in your city. She went on to found another company called Heyrenne. It's an app that delivers generic medications to you plus a personal health assistant. You're going to find all about her journey from beginning, you know, from just practicing to starting all these major businesses. Being a physician entrepreneur I know you're going to enjoy. Thanks. Welcome to the Passive Income MD podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. This is going to be an amazing interview. I have Dr. Renee Dua here. She's an amazing physician entrepreneur. She created this company called hey Renee based on her 15 years of experience as a practicing nephrologist. She's been in service as a chief medical, chief of medicine at two of LA's largest hospitals and she's. For seven years, she was the CMO, the chief medical officer at a company called Heal, during which time she oversaw the successful delivery of over 300,000 house calls. Now with her new company, hey Renee, she's raised millions of dollars to help underserved chronic disease patients really follow their doctor's care care plan towards living happier, healthier lives. She's also the mother of three children for pride and joy and in rear time, rare free time, which we'll talk about that. She cooks, she takes long drives with her husband, Dr. Nick Desai. So Renee, how are you doing?

I'm great. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm super excited to talk to you because I've heard about hey Renee. I've obviously heard about Heal. We'd be talking about all these things, but I don't think I did. Hey Renee, enough justice. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what is Heyrenne and what does it.

Certainly, certainly. So you know, we're all aware that there's tons of money being poured into what we call health tech at the moment. Right. We understood and we knew well before COVID but we understood that many people do not have access to care. Covid shone a light on that. But the fact is we're right now expecting patients to get a Lot of tasks done with not a lot of coordination in those tasks. So every time a patient gets seen, the doctor lists four things to get done. Our job at Hay Renee is to automate some of those things. In other words, I don't expect a patient to log into an app to get their medications delivered, log into a separate one to get their vitals checked, log into a separate one to get their mental health provider to see them, log into another one to get their care plan right. My anticipation, and certainly on the Haverenate platform is we'll put all of it together, right? Patient's care plan is there. We get their vitals, we manage their medication reminders and deliveries. We check in on their mental health. Hey, maybe they need a ride to get to one of these appointments. We schedule it, right? Everything's in one place. I actually, you know, hilariously would, of course, never name anything after myself, right? My husband did that. And the reason he did is I have a daughter and a caretaker and my father and my mother, who I take care of, say, hey, Renee, I have to get my X, Y and Z test done. Can you help me? Or, hey, Renee, can you give me the results of my X, Y and z test? And so I, hey, Renee, for them, I put it all together for them and, and give it to them in a format that they can understand. And they're well, they're doing really well, right?

I mean, I think physicians, we can all relate to that story of our family just asking us for things. Hey, Renee. Hey, Peter.

You know our patients too, right? I mean, I, I, I am a practicing doctor, and I have to tell you, I feel so much for my patients. They sit in my office and I give them those, those lists of four things, and I'll be damned if they come back having done two. Right? It's not their fault. Somebody has to bring the whole picture together, and it's a huge hole. And the other part of it is so much is expected of us doctors, right? I find it astounding. Every time an administrator see more patients close more care gaps, hedis this and that chart, one of these administrators has to come and sit and see what it's like in a doctor's office. It's outrageous. And so there's a massive ask on doctors. There's data bloat. They're being pulled in a thousand different directions. We want to be the back office. We'll do all the jobs that you theoretically cannot get done, but your patient will get those tasks done, and you'll actually be included in that process. Right. That's part of what we'll offer on the platform. So it's super exciting to me both as a caretaker and as a doctor. Right.

I mean, that's so cool. I mean, obviously you've served as chief medical officer or chief of medicine at a bunch of different hospitals. Was this always in the plan early on for you when you were coming up in training and your education to launch a big healthcare tech platform? How'd that work out?

The credit goes to my husband. You know, when I first met my husband, I was on an ER panel because I was growing my own private practice and we went to a Dodger game. And I'm telling you, I got paged every five minutes for the entirety of that game. And he just looked at me and he was like, is this our life? Right? Is this what we're going to do? How are we going to have kids? You know this, you can't be in all these places at once. And you know, I'm, I'm an old fashioned doctor. My patients really are very important to me. Right. I think about them all the time, even if I can't practice full time medicine. Right. So he took me on this journey of starting a company after a very scary experience with one of our sons. And it turns out I was pretty good at thinking through products and strategizing what doctors need, what patients should have. I became a patient as a mother. That's really what turned the light on for me. I was, you know, maybe yammering what I wanted my patients to do, but when I became a patient, it really created a whole host of, you know, empathetic provisions in this little brain. Right. And so that, that's what led me on the journey and every entrepreneur solving a problem.

I mean, I know that the early part of the journey included being chief medical officer at a company called Heal. Like, what did that look like for you on a day to day basis? And how are you balancing that with like your, your clinical work?

So Heal was another child for me. Right. That's how much I loved it, that's how much I poured into it. And I started HEAL after this very scary experience, having children. And we scaled Heal and the work I feel that we did there was tremendous. We scaled Heal into 12 states and we put $200 million of investment capital in it. Heal, though, to be clear, was started eight years ago, way before a pandemic. And our vision was to deliver primary care in the home using software. So while everybody and their mom is doing that now, eight Years ago, investors and hospitals and you know, patients were like, this is weird. You come to our house with a tablet and you bring all this stuff and you'll take care of my kids and my grandma. Like what? You know, now we had some great success especially in Orange county and Los Angeles and you know, New York. Right. But it wasn't until the pandemic where I think all this money that's gone into health tech has really found its home in these wild and crazy awesome ideas to get out of the way between doctor and patient. Right. I think that to me is the most fulfilling part of the work I did. At Heal, doctors were looking at their patients on video, telemedicine or their remote monitoring data and maybe even on the, in their living room couch and were like, I'm here for you. And I was like, mind blown that we can actually pull something like that.

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Yeah. So when, when I just left Heal in the last year, it was really because it's in an operational phase, it's growing, it's doing very well. And frankly, you know, it was in such a place that enough was automated that I didn't need to be there as much for day to day operations in my mind. Right. But I wanted to continue to work on this problem of getting out of the way of the doctor patient relationship. Right. And in my mind what isn't happening right now is this bottom up approach where you take this, this patient in your hand, hand to hand combat, get done what they need to stay home and stay well. Right. A doctor has her responsibilities, a payer or a hospital system. You know, some of their responsibilities are a bit perverse in my mind. Right. They're worried about Money and churn and, you know, I get it. But for patients, who's thinking about them, right? Who's thinking about their caretakers? Who's thinking about the fact that we're not going to have that many doctors and nurses and caretakers? A lot of this needs to be solved with software. And that's. That's the next problem, the next evolution of a problem I wanted to solve.

So you have this idea and you want to do this, and there's a lot of doctors who are watching this who have, like, they've had these ideas, right? This could be improved. This could. Like, what was the first step for you? Like, how did you know even how to get that started and to translate that ultimately get to a real product? But what was that initial early steps that you could kind of share with people?

The first and most important step was I had a partner who knew how to raise money, right? Because there are many ideas, and many of them are great ideas, but you're not going anywhere until you have some money in the bank and you could even use your own. In the beginning, we used our own in the beginning of, hey, Renee. We used our own, right? But you then need to scale. Once that idea gets cooking and going, you've put in the hard work. You need to scale. When we started heal, we had a little bit of money, right? And Nick, my husband, who was our CEO, and I would do the house calls, right? Or we would go to the farmer's market, and we would take people's blood pressures and bring balloons, right? So we did the, you know, the grassroots approach, but then we needed to have money to scale, and that's where it becomes very important to have the right partner if. Unless, you know, maybe you know how to do it yourself, but the right partner to help you grow that business.

I mean, how is it in that room when you're talking to venture capitalists and you're trying to raise millions of dollars for this type of thing? Being a doctor in that room, like, how does that make you feel? Because we don't have that background with finance, with business. What does it feel like in there?

You know, it's not always positive, right? It's not always positive. I've been in VC meetings where people have turned to my husband and been like, Dr. Dua, it's so great to meet you. And I'm like, do not use the Internet. You know, like, do a little diligence, right? But, you know, there's also the, you know, doctors I think, have become a part of a system, so they don't garner the same respect that maybe like my parents, who are both doctors, they were kings roaming the hallways of the hospital, you know, So I don't think it's always positive. You know, doctors have really lost a lot of that importance and respect, which I, you know, of course you can see on my face, I hate to see. On the other hand, we know something that people don't know, right? We know wellness, we know how to keep people well. And I dare any venture capitalist to solve problems on their own health without a doctor. Right? So it's really, it's really important when we are in these meetings and we are trying to raise money that we remember we have a skill set that the folks in the room simply don't have. And a lot of doctors were humble. You know, we're kind of quiet. We, we stay on the down low. You can't be that way when you're trying to impress people, right? It's, it's weird for us, but you got to open your mouth and say what's good about what you do know and what you can do.

I mean, now that you're in this world of entrepreneurship, you probably come across other doctors doing other types of really cool stuff. What do you think the potential is for doctors to enter this space and the opportunity that' there for people who have ideas to make things happen? What does that look like in terms of that market and opportunities?

It is huge. You know, doctors, we're a limited number. We are very smart, we are very thoughtful, we are very compassionate. The health in this, the health care industry, let's call it, is suffering from trust issues, right? We need to be the face of that trust. We need to be the face of that data and that acquisition of data and aggregating that data. There are so many things we can do, especially when we band together. You know, most doctors work for somebody now, but even if you work for somebody and while you work for yourself, it's important that you stand up and do the right thing. Do what's right for the patient, right? You will always be rich. And that's part of how we all, in my mind, can have such an impact.

And what does your life look like today? You still practicing? And I think you are in terms of clinical medicine, and how do you balance that between, you know, being a mother as well, like you mentioned, you know, working on your business, doing all this, like, how do you make that happen?

So let me be very clear. I have an enormous amount of help, right? I have a wonderful Partner and a husband. Our parents are still with us. I have nanny, I have a nanny at night when I need it. Right. I am tired. I'm not going to sit here and, you know, tell you I'm the most well rested person on your, on your panels. But the thing, there's that old saying, right? When you, when you love what you do, it's not a job, it's not work, and I love it. And I see the impact of what I do and, you know, I see the impact of what I do on my children. Right before we started this call, my little girl was in here. She was saying hi to the person on Zoom, right. She's fixing her hair, pretty ready. I mean, this is going to be the way we're talking. This is going to be her life. And if, you know, she becomes a doctor one day and would be such a privilege to see that, I hope she does the same things. Right? To better our world, to better our patients world. Right. So it's, in the end, it's worth it.

That's awesome. I mean, how important do you think it is for doctors, though, to try to, you know, reach out and, or create these, you know, alternative type of things? Is this for everyone? Is this some people? You know.

Yeah.

How should doctors be thinking about that?

It's not for everyone. Doctors work hard. You know, I, I know how hard doctors work and they have to respect their own life balance. They have to respect their own mental health. And so, no, it's not for everyone. It is for someone that has a voice that wants to command an idea that, you know, is able to do things outside of their time. Seeing patients that they truly enjoy and they don't feel, you know, impresses, pressure or distaste or dislike. Right. So I don't think it's for everyone. Again, I also do think many doctors who are, you know, typically wonderful people can find partners to help them grow a great idea if they can't do it all themselves.

Now that you've been here and you, you know, you've been balancing all these things. Like, people see where you're at and they're like, oh, my goodness, like, you know, she, she, she made it this far. You know, probably I haven't seen a lot of the challenges that you've had to pass or go through or the obstacles you've had to hurdle. What are some of those things that, you know, you had to get through to get where you're at that people might be interested?

Certainly. And for that question, the true answer, we need an extension of our time together.

Right.

Lots of mistakes. Lots of maybe I should have planned that better. Lots of missing out on opportunities. I don't go to every Thanksgiving parade for the kids. I maybe don't take as many vacations as I'd love. Lots of no. You know, if I had a nickel for every time a person said no to me, I would be very, very rich. Right. So the lots of rejection. And again, rejection is not for everybody. You know, so there are, there are lots of negatives, but again, I'm always on the next corner waiting to see what happens and suddenly something comes through. You know.

Where do you see this going? And I mean, you guys, what stage exactly are you at with hey Renee? And where do you see it going the next three to five years?

Yeah. So, hey, Renee has $8 million in seed funding, which means we don't have a product live yet, which is pretty, pretty cool. A pretty exciting stage of a company. In the next couple weeks here, we're going to have what's called our minimum viable product. So it will be the easiest parts, the lowest hanging fruits of what we could do, but with a promise to deliver improvements in the patient care task management aspects that we described. Now, what we hope to do, and certainly in the next year, what we will do is grow the company with that money. Right. We will deliver this service to patients and caretakers and we will build automation. Right. And predictions to how we can help them without so much human support.

I mean, now that you come along this journey, obviously it wasn't part of your story early on, but, you know, you saw the opportunities, you took them, you're solving problems, you're knocking these things down. After doing all this, like, how does it feel to look back knowing that you have all these different things? As a physician, you wear many hats. How does that feel for you?

I mean, again, I just love it. Right. I live my life not taking it for granted. You know, I get up every day and I think I do something interesting. You know, I do not wait for life to come to me. I grabbed the bull by the horns. And I'm not saying that's for everybody, but I'm saying that when I was, you know, in the, in the process of deciding to be a doctor, it was never in my mind to just see patients. I wanted to be a part of a patient story and I knew I was going to be a patient, so I wanted to be a part of improving that whole series of events.

It's so cool. I know that people are going to Be watching this. I mean, they're going to hear this story. They're going to want to know more about hey Renee. But they also want to connect with you in some way. What's the best place for people to do that? Find out more about you?

Certainly. And I'd love to hear from anybody that would be excited to know more. So my email is really the fastest way. It's R E N E E at Heyrenae Co. All right, we'll have that.

And we also have the hey, Renee. There you have that nice sign for us back there. So it's easy for people to remember.

Yeah, the heyrenae.com, right? Yeah. That heyrenae.com actually will literally be live tomorrow. We just got the hope. Boom. It's boom.

That's awesome. I was ahead of the game. I knew it was coming right on time.

Right on.

All right, well, congrats on that. You know, I really appreciate your time. Obviously, you're extremely busy, but you're doing amazing work out there. Before we leave people with, you know, for this interview by sharing a tip for someone who wants to, you know, first follow in your footsteps, create a company, follow through on a passion or idea.

So my, my tip is actually to sit down and make a plan for how you see that company growing. Right. How do you see a path from your idea to making money or growing? Maybe not making money yet? Right. That's tip one, and then I'll just add a second tip. If it's not you, who's the partner that's going to help you scale that idea into a reality? Right. Because it's probably a great idea. It's probably a great vision. You need to put rubber to road.

All right. That is so amazing. Congrats on all the amazing work that you've, you know, accomplished so far. No, your story's not finished yet. Right. I'll be waiting to know you again sometime soon and just.

Yeah.

And see kind of where this absolutely goes. Want to thank you for all the amazing work you do for people and just being a great example of what's possible out there in terms of, you know, being a physician, you know, wearing different hats. It's so cool to hear. So congrats on all that and yeah, good luck with. With the launch and let's talk again soon.

All right. Talk more soon. Bye.

Bye. Thanks. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you part of our community, yet join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group Passive Income Docs, and you can always learn more at our website passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.