App brings doctors on demand to Baldwin Park doorsteps

With two kids age 5 and younger, Baldwin Parker Matt McBride and his wife Kathryn have spent their fair share of time in doctor's office waiting rooms.

Once the tummy-aches and sniffles move in, the whole family is shuffling schedules and scouring for open office appointments. Matt spent hours aloof in germy waiting rooms brainstorming how there had to be a better way to get his kids better faster.

"What I found was lacking was customer service," he said.

And then the self-proclaimed "serial entrepreneur" got an idea last August: "I thought of a kind of Uber-method of healthcare," he said. "What if the doctor came to you?"

In this day in age, doctors making house calls are familiar only from the movies, but McBride said they're becoming more and more common. He said there are other on-demand doctor apps, but none currently active in Central Florida.

So on June 1, McBride launched his own. The Mend Family app operates much like the on-demand car service Uber, but each in-motion dot on the app's map screen is a licensed doctor or nurse on the move. You fill out a form about your symptoms and the service you need, choose which on-call doctor you'd like to see, and you're instantly given an estimated time-of-arrival for the doctor to show up at your door. The app provides up-to-the-minute updates on when the doctor will come knocking.

"You're not getting a four-hour window, it's down to the minute," McBride said.

"It's a high tech approach with sort of that old fashioned doctor-comes-to-your-home kind of thing."

The service, which launched last month, is currently serving the Baldwin Park area exclusively, with hopes to eventually expand throughout the Winter Park and Orlando areas.

McBride said each Mend Family doctor is fully vetted with background checks and proper medical licensing. And, he said, the doctors and nurses who are on-call can tend to most any aliments at a home visit that patients would usually make a trip to the doctor's office or urgent care clinic for, from immunizations and physicals to fevers and the flu.

"It's all just kind of about rethinking the experience of how you go to the doctor," he said.

Most insurance companies, McBride said, generally cover the medical care provided by the on-the-move doctors. But, he said, there is an additional travel-fee associated with the service, which isn't covered by insurance. Fee costs are detailed on the app's website.

Also available through Mend, but not often covered by insurance, is the app's telemedicine service. In this case, a doctor is just a phone call away ready to offer advice for your ailments, and you can send them photos or video so they can better serve your needs.

"Before now, healthcare has been behind in tech," McBride said. "You can open your garage door with your phone, but you can't talk to a doctor."

Now, on the Mend app, a doctor's advice is just a dial away.

McBride said to start, doctors are available regular business hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday through Friday. But eventually, he said, they'd like to extend service to nights and weekends.

As Mend continues to grow, McBride said he hopes the service can help Baldwin Parkers limit their time spent waiting and work on getting well faster all without leaving home.