Announcing PeerWell Health

"What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing." - Bono

We've been on a journey through healthcare and what a journey it has been. We started with our strengths: building technology, talking to patients, and learning as much as we could as quickly as possible.

Among the many things we learned, a few things stood out to us:

Patients need more. And they weren't getting it.

Treatment options are being provided that do not fit the person or situation. For instance there is mounting evidence that orthopedic surgeries can be avoided with comprehensive treatment plans and yet surgeries still get scheduled regularly as a first option.

There is also no standard PreHab before surgery even though there are a myriad of evidence-based activities that can improve a patient’s outcome and recovery time.

Healthcare has a cart abandonment problem.

The healthcare system is so difficult to navigate that most people give up and find other ways to solve their problem such as self-diagnosis, home remedies, and self-medication.

Most often, patients decide to just suffer with it, oftentimes for years or decades. The burden to figure out how to resolve their physical pain and the uncertainty of if it will be resolved at all or get worse is higher than just tolerating a minor issue until it is too big to ignore.

We aren’t treated as “whole people”. 

Our symptoms are treated individually, and only those that can have a known diagnosis code. There is no diagnosis code for “life is hard”. 

Everyone is struggling with multiple things at the same time, but when you see a specialist, it is not normal to expect help for those other issues. Why would a knee surgeon care about my mental health or the reasons behind my bad diet? Even if they did care, what could they do about it beyond just telling me I should fix it? 

In reality, those other comorbidities are hidden blockers to a full recovery and the system is not designed to uncover and treat those issues. We are left to figure out how to untie the knots ourselves without support, education, or guidance. 

Introducing PeerWell Health

I co-founded PeerWell because I believed, deeply, that the healthcare my family received could have been delivered much better. I was appalled by the experience my father had when going through 2 knee replacements. I think at least one of them could have been avoided. I see it everyday with my close friends telling me about new pains they avoid getting treatment for because, "healthcare is way too hard". This is my fundamental disconnect with the universe.

Through this journey, we've learned and now we've leveraged what we’ve learned to launch PeerWell Health, our new multi-speciality medical practice. Starting today, in California, if you are struggling with pain and immobility, you can get care from our trained team of specialty clinicians that will treat the whole you.

Here are just a few of the ways PeerWell Health works for you:

• If you're in pain but unable to do physical therapy because you struggle with mental health, you shouldn't need to go to two different places to get the correct treatment. Moreover, those providers should not be siloed and not talk to each other to figure out how to get you better.
• If you're unsure about surgery and not sure what to do next, we can guide you through evidence-based practices to reduce the need for surgery. For instance, physical therapy, weight loss, drug-free pain management among other practices available through PeerWell Health can reduce pain and avoid unnecessary surgery.
• If you've got high blood sugar and an upcoming knee replacement surgery, we know that your PreHab should address nutrition and BMI in order to lower your risk of infection. Your orthopedic surgeon will end up thanking you.

We are here to provide a new option for ourselves and our family when we struggle with pain and immobility. When your mom tells you she's having trouble sleeping because her back pain is keeping her awake (and she doesn't want to take the opioids she was prescribed), PeerWell Health is designed for exactly that moment. A service that you and her can use right away and that is there to guide her through the whole journey.

We've built our multi-specialty care team to work like a performance team. This team includes Physical Therapists, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Registered Dietitians, Registered Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Medical Doctors, and Care Coordinators. Working together, they ensure that you achieve your goals and will be with you the whole way, past the finish line.

The PeerWell Health care team has been carefully selected as we all share the same core values. That is a shared understanding that the future of healthcare means treating the whole person. All of our physicians have bought into, and trained with our five pillars for health performance. We also leverage new technologies improve the service quality and patient experience, allowing more people to get care without sacrificing quality. 

PeerWell Health is available today in California, expanding to more states in the near future. We’re on a mission to eliminate the burden of pain and immobility for all people, worldwide and we’re excited to take this major leap forward. Taking care of people the way we’d want our families to be cared for is our passion.

If you or your family is struggling with pain and immobility, please check out PeerWell Heath today.