#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Dr. Renee Dua, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Renee
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Improving access to quality caregiving with a Digital Health Assistant
After building her own medical practice, Dr. Renee Dua has relied on that experience to found and grow two innovative tech startups in the healthcare space. The company she currently leads, Renee, as Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, provides members with a generic medication subscription service as well as an automated health assistant to support the care of elderly or sick individuals. We spoke with Renee about the important healthcare access benefits of her caregiving platform, the lessons she has learned about navigating the fundraising ecosystem as a two-time company founder, and why companies, as well as policymakers, need to be thoughtful in how they approach automated systems.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Renee?
I am a physician by training. I've been in practice for about 20 years, and I still see patients through my private practice. That was my first real startup. But my first technology startup, Heal, was born out of the experience I had becoming a mother, which was terrible. It led to personal travesty, and I poured all the grief of that experience into Heal, which grew to 12 states and close to 300,000 house calls. With Heal, we envisioned providing primary care in the home. This was before the pandemic and people thought we were crazy for prioritizing setting up an at-home and virtual experience for patients when there was believed to be no need. We would send a physician to conduct a house call to your living room who would set you, the patient or caregiver, up with one touch telemedicine and remote monitoring devices—so you could have a very high-touch virtual experience seeing a physician later on. The concept was very unique until the pandemic where everybody was like, “Why aren't we all doing this?” And now you can see that there is a remote monitoring or telemedicine or housecall company being built on every corner.
Heal grew to the point where it was ready for new leadership beyond us as founders. So Nick, my husband, and I left and at the same time we had entered this period where I'd become the caregiver for my parents. My mom suffered from cancer and my father has had multiple health complications. Of course I’ve done what so many have to do as a child who loves their parents: deliver medications, set medication reminders, record what was happening in an appointment with their doctor, and more. Even as a trained doctor, it’s a real challenge to keep up with everything. About a year ago, I turned to Nick and I said, “This is crazy. It's a full time job on top of all the other things I do and I've got to find a way to automate myself.” And his response was, “Why don't we do that? Why don't we build a personal health assistant—part human, part digital?” Seniors and aging folks prefer to talk to humans, so we knew that had to be a capability of any platform. But there are many things that automation can manage such as medication reminders, scheduling, and delivery. And that's the company we’re building now, Renee.
What does the Renee platform do for users? How is it structured?
On top of being a personal health assistant to support users managing their medical “to-dos,” Renee has this very cool offering we just released where we will, for a direct-to-consumer subscription price, deliver all of your generic medications. For $25 a month, a member has a choice of the most common 500 generic medications. A diabetic who needs mental health medications and has breast cancer can find drugs they need and we will ship them all those medications as part of their description. We've obviously got lots of people signing up since launching this, but what we're seeing in terms of the most new subscriptions is people who don't have insurance, people who have big copays on their medications, and people who frankly cannot get to the pharmacy to pick up refills. Those are the people that are using this service and need not just medication, but the support to get refills, reminders, and appointments scheduled.
Renee wants to focus on seniors or people who are aging and starting to have medical problems. We think that people, especially in the aging community, either don't share enough with their doctors, can't share enough with their doctors, or they don't have a doctor. We want to hold hands with patients and get exactly what they need and then figure out how to help them. And that's really where the push of the personal health assistant comes into play. Once we know, and the patient has shared with us which medications they take, we then have the automation and the intelligence to make sure they get a wellness exam, lab scheduled, and mental health appointment. At Renee, we are proactively routing the patient into the care they need. Therefore, the patient is getting the most out of their medications as well. Our goal is to take the menial but time consuming tasks away from our members and their caregivers. Renee performs the tasks that a caregiver typically does when you're sick or aging to provide the member and the caregiver peace of mind.
You've co-founded two companies at this point. What are the lessons, in particular around accessing the capital you need, you've learned from building Heal and Renee? What should others in the health technology space know?
Creating a medical practice actually gave me quite a few skills that helped me get a startup off the ground. However, the learning didn't stop there. We actually won a pitch competition at a summit and that was a $50,000 award which contributed to funding Heal. And from that, we raised $13 million in seed funding from angels and VCs. Though over time we received $200 million dollars in investor funding, it was very difficult to fund Heal because it was a very expensive company to run and it was ahead of its time. We started with a fee-for-service model where we were getting paid per house call, then we moved to a value-based care model where we were taking the risk of adopting a financial model that was based on the care we delivered. When we left Heal, we were considered accomplished founders, even though there was so much left to do. Our track record really smoothed the pathway to obtaining seed funding more easily for Renee. But then the market became very unstable due to the economic shocks of the pandemic.
Renee really has to deliver on growth moving forward, and more importantly, Renee really has to deliver on making a profit. The days of companies that bring in investments while still making no money, which as a doctor I find so mind boggling, are behind us. In particular, I think if you look at the market, a lot of tech sectors are facing challenges, but health tech investments are down by 90 percent. This is in large part because during COVID a lot of health technologies unable to improve outcomes or doing unethical things got funded, and now the result is a lot of funders are going to think twice about putting their money into health tech, in my opinion.
Have you encountered challenges trying to reach folks who don't have Internet access or necessary digital literacy skills through either of your companies?
We intentionally built Heal and Renee to function in a 4G and 5G environment, so if you have a smartphone—which we have found that most of our seniors do—you’re able to access and use both of the platforms. Once a user is able to access Heal, even on a cell network, they are able to book a house call. And with Renee, a user can upload their insurance information from a photo of the card on their phone or they can take a picture of their pill bottle, upload it, and we will then take care of the rest of it by getting those medications delivered. All of these things are possible as long as they have access to either a traditional Internet signal or a cell signal with Internet access. We do not expect Renee members to download an app, most importantly.
You mentioned that one of the primary benefits of the Renee platform is the automation of key tasks. What do you think is important for policymakers, your members, and others to understand about automation or other emerging technologies like AI?
We will do a video phone onboarding with a person at Renee so that they can give us their history, medical insurance information, and doctors information. On the back end, we're using automation and software we build to put all of the information in one place for the members. If you need a primary care provider appointment, we know who your doctor is. If you want the first-available appointment, we've already figured out when that is for you. You can have an experience where you don't even have to type. We've already thought about what you're going to ask for.
There is no way to scale a company that millions of people could be using without new software and automation. We’re slowly using AI/ML for data aggregation. As AI and ML models grow, the companies using these technologies will have to build trust with consumers. Artificial intelligence becomes scary when you don't have trust in the company building the technology. And in our experience, building trust with seniors isn’t easy, which is why we begin our member’s experience with a video call with a human. We want our members to be comfortable with Renee.
What are your goals for Renee moving forward?
We’re going to build out an experience specifically for the caregivers that are responsible for taking care of our members. Right now, I am focused on the success of the new medication delivery program we rolled out. To be very granular, I'd love for Renee to have 1000 active users. Once we reach that point, we will have proved a concept. And I think that this notion of a personal health assistant is kind of like your cell phone. You didn't know you needed it until you had it. I think Heal was centered around this notion of delivering accessibility to care in the home which was very profound, and I think it's taken on a life of its own. And I think Renee is similarly centered around this notion of a personal health assistant. People don't even realize the things they're not doing, missing, or putting stress on someone else to do until they have a system that can take care of it. And so I'm hoping this is the next novel concept.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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