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Text-Based Pediatric Telemedicine Startup Summer Health Launches Specialty Care

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The team at Summer Health has carved out a unique value proposition.

The digital health startup bills itself as the first nationwide healthcare entity to offer text-based pediatric care, promising parents and caregivers they can answers to their child’s health questions within fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Summer Health boasts its $20 per month service has “answers for every stage” of a child’s development aged 0–2, and can field questions on conditions such as fever, vomiting and diarrhea, minor cuts and scrapes, and more.

The company isn’t sitting still. In a press release published on Tuesday, Summer Health announced the advent of specialty care services. The feature is inclusive of areas like nutrition, sleep, and lactation.

“As parents continue to struggle with accessing timely, quality care due to the mounting pediatrician shortage, Summer Health is committed to providing trusted, ongoing medical support for everyday parenting needs,” the company wrote in a statement included in the press release. “With over 80% of non-urgent care visits being related to sleep and feeding concerns, Summer Health solves for a fragmented healthcare system and ensures the smoothest journey for parents who are in need of medical advice beyond the primary pediatrician’s office.”

“We are radically simplifying healthcare to bring unprecedented convenience and reassurance to parents,” said Summer Health founder and chief executive Ellen DaSilva in an interview with me earlier this month. “With the launch of Specialty Care, Summer Health is continuing to evolve its care platform to adapt to its parents’ needs with support for everyday care concerns including nutrition, sleep, and lactation.”

Prior to starting Summer Health, DaSilva was an executive elsewhere and saw firsthand the “asynchronous care” and sought a more humanized approach to delivering telemedicine. As a mother herself, DaSilva is acutely aware that a parent’s concern over their child’s is an evergreen, round-the-clock mindset. In creating Summer Health, she wanted to build something respective and empathetic of those feelings.

“I knew there had to be a better way of providing around the clock pediatric care for parents, that is more credible and convenient than turning to urgent care or Google,” DaSilva said. “In building Summer Health, I wanted to create a solution that would not replace a traditional pediatrician, but would be a supplemental service for parents to turn to during their time of need for credible, continuous support.”

Today’s news of the specialty services is yet another building block.

“Over 80% of non-urgent care visits are related to sleep and feeding concerns. Lactation closely follows as one of the most requested issues parents experience and for which they need guidance,” DaSilva said of the impetus for adding specialty care. “The launch of our Specialty Care expansion eliminates the need of incurring hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in seeking care outside of their primary provider and also circumvents the lag time in being able to secure an appointment.”

She continued: “Summer Health’s Specialty Care will further empower parenting with confidence especially when it comes to transitions in nutrition, sleep or lactation that can be challenging and emotional to navigate. We are going beyond just offering primary needs and will be able to bridge the gap between routine check ins and other major developmental needs that arise on the day-to-day. This expansion will really help parents save time, money and energy so they can focus on what matters—getting answers about their children’s health. This is a product I crave, and I know other parents want to see it exist as well.”

From an accessibility standpoint, especially in a disability context, Summer Health’s focus on texting to facilitate care is a shrewd move in terms of user experience. In addition to being less costly as DaSilva mentioned, the truth is texting can be a more accessible means for many people. The most obvious use case is accommodating those who have atypical speech; the truth is, it can be easier (and more efficient) for someone with a speech delay to use their phone to type back and forth with a provider rather than sit through an anxiety-inducing phone call. Likewise, it’s also true the text-based methodology is not only an accepted communicative method, but can be more appropriate in social situations where discretion and courteousness may be necessary. Most people view texting as a technology of convenience—and it is—but what’s convenient for one may be accessibility for another. This concept applies to all scenarios, not merely in healthcare. Texting is accessibility too.

DaSilva acknowledged texting’s prevalence. “Text-based communication meets parents where they are and fits into their everyday lives. This allows parents and caregivers to notify a licensed pediatrician of an issue or ask a quick question when they have a free moment, and to check the response at their convenience,” she said. “Parents are constantly working through balancing the demands of work and childcare. Access to a text-based care platform not only cuts the need to carve out time for travel, wait times and navigating referral processes, but it also holds a historical log which saves time and energy in re-briefing pediatricians.”

DaSilva is cognizant of the ways in which tech and healthcare intersect.

“Tech is currently embedded into a lot of aspects of healthcare. Despite this, the healthcare system continues to operate in a fragmented manner even in spite of incorporating lots of tech into its operations. What we find missing is a more human-centric approach to fusing the two, to solve for patients who are already concerned when seeking out care,” she said of the confluence. “At Summer Health we place parents and their children at the very forefront of everything that we do. Integral to our text-based approach is empathy and intuitive tech to where all conversations are stored for historical reference and parents can even send pictures to help pediatricians arrive at a diagnosis faster.”

As for feedback, DaSilva told me she and her team hear from parents who report they find “instant relief” in the ability to text a doctor and promptly receive guidance and resolution. She added community members have been vocal in requesting support for sleep, nutrition, and lactation, saying all are "behavioral states that change quite quickly as children develop.” Summer Health closely monitored the number of people who asked for the new types of service, according to DaSilva.

“Another realization we had since launch was seeing how our physicians would also find themselves referring to specialists with some frequency,” DaSilva said. “Given our caregivers are speaking with [our] physicians multiple times per month, the interest has been compounding. We’re thrilled to be able to keep the loop closed so our caregivers can see specialists within the vetted Summer Health ecosystem.”

In the long run, Summer Health has ambitions of being a one-stop shop.

“Eventually, we want to ensure that parents and caregivers can get all of their health and wellness information from Summer Health within 15 minutes,” DaSilva said of her company’s future. “The idea of waiting for a primary care doctor or specialist, or turning to a unaccredited internet source, for medical care should be a concept of the past. Instead, we envision a world in which parents can access all of this credible information for whatever is on a parent’s mind quickly and reliably.”

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