Traveling telehealth, home visit medical startup expands to Stark, Summit counties

Dr. Nupur Mehta’s primary care practice looks different than a typical doctor’s office. In fact, it looks like a patient’s home – because it is.

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Mehta is the founder of Heyday Health, a startup primary care service for seniors that combines home-based health care and telehealth options, as well as a care team dedicated to helping patients navigate the health system.

“Historically, doctors used to come to the house. That used to be the model,” Mehta said. “And it was an opportunity for doctors to meet patients and families, pet their dogs, look in their cupboards and really understand the true lived circumstances of people.”

What is Heyday Health?

Mehta received his medical degree and a master's in public health from Harvard University and did his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He spent time doing HIV work in Africa before returning to the United States, where he’s worked in a variety of roles as a physician and advocate for better access to healthcare.

In April 2021, he and his team launched Heyday Health in Youngstown, serving Trumbull, Mahoning and Columbiana counties. Now, after a year of growing the practice, they're expanding to serve Stark, Summit and Portage counties.

“Instead of patients forcing them to come to us and on our schedule and the hours that we set, we're now meeting them where they're at,” Mehta said

Every patient with Heyday is assigned a three-person care team consisting of a physician, a nurse practitioner and a health ally. The health ally is a non-medical person responsible for coordinating other avenues of care with the patients, including tasks like setting up specialist doctors’ appointments or tracking down prior authorizations or finding transportation options for patients.

New patients start with an in-home visit to get to know their care team and get set up with the technological side of the practice, and from there have regularly scheduled telehealth sessions to manage ongoing care.

“We found that we can do the vast majority of things that you can think of virtually like rashes, swelling, shortness of breath, like we can do a lot of things,” Mehta said. “But we always have the ability to come back because we're local.”

Getting a home visit from Heyday Health

Ravenna resident Linda Huston, 71, said being with Heyday has kept her husband Tom, 68, from having to move into a nursing facility. Tom is largely unable to leave home and Linda, as his caregiver, said that transportation was nearly impossible for her to handle alone, so they needed home health care.

“I had looked for a visiting doctor for a year and couldn't get anybody to come because they were so overwhelmed with the COVID,” Linda said

They found Heyday, which was covered by both their Medicare and Medicaid plans, and Linda said the practice took her on in addition to her husband. Now, she says she recommends them to everyone she comes across.

“The hospital was almost inhibiting me from taking care of my husband, where these guys their goal is to be there for us and keep him out of a nursing home,” she said. “They really don't want him to even have to go to emergency or anything. They're there for me 24/7.”

To Mehta, the combination of modern telehealth solutions with the old fashioned medical practice of house calls could be a way to address some of the major challenges patients and doctors face when interacting with the healthcare industry.

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"If there were better broadband access and infrastructure, I really think that this model or models like these could be a solution to health care deserts, places where there aren't enough health care providers, specifically primary care, because there's a massive primary care shortage in the country," Mehta said.

There are benefits to the providers as well, he said, who can work from home for their telehealth visits and have some flexibility in their scheduling. Ultimately, Mehta said, the model is helping him and his team focus on patient health, rather than just sickness.

"Clinicians get a chance to be clinicians again, and really think and spend time and get to know their patients, which is really the joy of primary care," Mehta said. "Primary care is not complicated or challenging medically. The joy of primary care is about relationships and getting to know people over time and seeing how they evolve over the years. This actually enables us to do that."

Sam Zern can be reached at szern@cantonrep.com or 330-580-8322. You can also find her on Twitter at @sam_zern.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Heyday Health brings home, telemedicine to Stark County seniors