Dr. Mick Singh envisions a world where quality healthcare is easily accessible to all—and he’s creating it with HealthX.
After creating MobileVAX to deliver COVID vaccines directly to Chicagoans in their homes, Dr. Mick Singh was inspired to apply the same idea to individual healthcare with HealthX.
What if managing your own healthcare were as easy as ordering an Uber? That’s the idea behind HealthX, a Chicago-based startup founded by Elysium SurgiSpa owner Dr. Mick Singh. Inspired to take action during the pandemic, the Air Force veteran established MobileVAX to provide COVID vaccines directly to residents in their homes. Now, he’s using that ease-of-access approach and applying it to HealthX, an “Amazon meets Uber” hybrid that, simply put, delivers care directly to your door. Here, as the River North-based company expands its reach into all 50 states, Singh gives us the inside scoop on the idea’s inspiration, the importance of access and where he sees HealthX in five years.
What inspired you to start HealthX?
So, let me take you to the origin story. When COVID was at its peak, there were these huge vaccination centers, like at the United Center. The Department of Defense came in; basically, it was people in uniforms trying to vaccinate people in masks. That was a turnoff for some, and I realized that that last stretch of getting vaccinations into people’s arms was going to require a different strategy, which was to take it mobile. That’s how doctors used to function back in the day—they would make house calls. At some point we lost touch with that, and [now] we individuals come into big healthcare centers, sit in the reception area for an hour, the doctor comes in for five minutes, [and you’re] in and out. The whole experience of being treated has been turned on its head; and with this, we were trying to reenvision something of what used to be, where doctors could make house calls. So we created MobileVAX, and we were able to help deliver all these vaccines into the arms of people in their homes. We were provided with a grant from the Chicago Department of Public Health and got recognized for our vaccine efforts; [then] we were recognized by the IDPH and the Illinois Emergency Management teams and started doing vaccinations throughout the state. At the same time, a nonprofit partner called CORE—Community Organized Relief Effort, Sean Penn’s nonprofit—started seeing what we were doing, and they were like, ‘Why don’t you become our preferred medical provider?’ So they brought us on the journey with them here in Illinois but also in the state of Georgia. While we were doing all this, we were developing systems that would one day become the backbone of what we call HealthX, which is a decentralized way of delivering healthcare where you don’t need to go to a brick-and-mortar location to obtain the same services that you would at your physician’s office. We have developed an app—think of it as a merger of Amazon and Uber—where you can interact with evaluation tools, and, based on that, if you want to have a physician’s visit via telehealth, you’re able to schedule that, and then we have healthcare providers routed to your home or your office, for instance, for testing for COVID, STI testing, preventative health screenings... all are available in the palm of your hand, and the results are uploaded to whoever your healthcare team is. This is what we see as the future of healthcare—making it simpler but elevating the standard of care.
What are some of the advantages that HealthX has over the standard model of care?
The antiquated model requires you to chase healthcare rather than having it be in the palm of your hands. [During the pandemic] we saw what it meant to be isolated, and, when you’re isolated, how fractured care and services can become. At that point, we [as a society] made a big pivot to make things remote, and that pushed business ideas that allowed you to have services at home in a more convenient fashion. We do believe that that’s going to be the future of healthcare outside of surgical care or something super-specialized. We want to be more engaged in our own healthcare, where you’re interacting with your own provider, your own test results, better education and better tools that can help empower you to have a better lifestyle or make better lifestyle choices.
Why do you think technology is crucial to or goes hand in hand with effective healthcare?
The advantage is in the fact that you can communicate more effectively with your patients. A lot of medical jargon goes over the heads of patients, or physicians are very poorly trained in being able to effectively communicate with patients. Physicians often assume that what they’re saying, everyone is interpreting properly. We believe that with the right technology, with the right mix of clinicians together, we can use technology as a very effective tool to help deliver and penetrate services as well as treatments for patients so they’re better informed about their health.
Talk more about how HealthX is going to evolve that dynamic between the provider and patient.
Interpersonal relationships are very important, especially that physician-patient relationship. So we believe that when you open up the lines of communication, you form better relationships with that provider—and that’s what this application allows you to do; if you have questions regarding your healthcare, you can interact directly with your midlevel provider, who can be a text message away from you. [Our goal is to be at] the cutting edge for delivering technology that will allow individuals to interact with the health provider team and consider themselves a part of the team rather than the subject of the treatment.
Where do you see HealthX five years from now?
One of the advantages of having a technological platform such as HealthX—which we have developed from scratch—is that it allows us to scale. And when we can scale this, we can take it into other markets or other countries and improve access to care. In about five years, I see us being able to penetrate into different pockets of the market and help establish a more standard brand, not only using HealthX as a proprietary brand, but being more ubiquitous as the underlying DNA through which other medical practices can jump on board and utilize their systems so they can help improve the care they deliver to their patient panels.
Photography by: PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATRINA WITTKAMP
