The Build #37: Physical

Many entrepreneurial ideas for new companies are based on the latest technology, but not Pediatric Housecalls. They are redefining the patient experience and bringing back the old-fashioned way to practice medicine, but with a modern twist. This mobile Urgent Care practice takes their medical staff on the road, allowing patients to diagnose and treat common childhood illnesses without leaving the comfort of home.

I’m joined today by Pediatric Housecalls founder Sara DuMond, MD. We take a look at the technology and the community that makes this company work. Sara shares how she can maintain a high-quality staff without ever working in the same office, and ways she has overcome the obstacles that come with building any new company. Sara has thrown conventional wisdom out the window, and as a result has turned her dream job into a thriving medical practice. It’s the story of Pediatric Housecalls on The Build.

More about today’s guest:

• Pediatric Housecalls on Instagram and Facebook.

Key Takeaways

[1:20] The concept of, and inspiration behind Pediatric Housecalls.
[5:43] What it took to form an all-mom staff that delivers high quality in-home medical care.
[8:48] How Pediatric Housecalls found their niche in the Charlotte medical community.
[11:00] The distinction of the patient experience with in-home medical care.
[15:05] Overcoming obstacles while disrupting the medical industry.
[18:01] Leveraging technology to make Pediatric Housecalls work outside the doctor’s office.
[20:32] Balancing all of the facets of a business starts with effective scheduling.
[23:12] Finding staff that shares Sara’s vision for quality modern-day in-home care business.
[28:56] Scaling a business for growth starts with perfecting the current process.
[31:16] How Sara has succeeded in making week-to-week scheduling work.

Transcript

Announcer (00:03):
2820 Radio in Philadelphia, it's The Build. Conversations with entrepreneurs and innovators about their dreams, their triumphs, and their challenges.

Joe Taylor Jr. (00:14):
Physical. Most entrepreneurs launch companies to solve a problem they see in the world, especially when it's something they experienced in their own lives. As the mother of three, Sara DuMond realized how tough it is to keep a family schedule on track when one of the kids get sick or it needs a sports physical. As a board certified pediatrician, she realized there was something she could do about it. Instead of operating a traditional doctor's office, Dr. DuMond's reviving the kind of practice that nearly died out a generation ago and she's attracted the team of energetic healthcare professionals who make house calls for patients throughout the Charlotte, North Carolina metropolitan area. It's the story of Pediatric Housecalls coming up next on The Build.

Announcer (01:02):
The Build is made possible with support from 2820 Press providing business consulting and content strategy services to customer obsessed companies nationwide. More information at 2820press.com.

Joe Taylor Jr. (01:20):
It's The Build. I'm Joe Taylor Jr. Joined today by Sara DuMond, who is the founder of Pediatric Housecalls. A board certified pediatrician with over 10 years in the field. Dr. DuMond, welcome to the show.

Sara DuMond (01:33):
Thanks for having me.

Joe Taylor Jr. (01:35):
A lot of folks that talk about entrepreneurs, especially in the year 2018, talk about the uber for x, but the concept behind Pediatrics Housecalls is something that is not new to the last 10 years of technology. It actually hearkens back to the way that medicine was practiced many years ago. Tell me a little bit about what you do and what the inspiration was for you to launch this kind of practice.

Sara DuMond (02:03):
Exactly. So that's one of the things that we love about telling people about Pediatric Housecalls is that we are really bringing back an old fashioned way to practice medicine, but with a modern day twist. We're essentially a mobile pediatric urgent care or acute care medical practice. So think of your local pediatric walk- in clinic or a local pediatric urgent care. And then we bring the doctor's office to you. So we're staffed by two full time board certified pediatricians as well as six pediatric nurse practitioners who practice independently and we essentially bring our proverbial black bags into your home and we're able to diagnose and treat most common childhood illnesses without you ever leaving the comfort of your home. So the inspiration behind it, I would say, it was very layered. The short answer as to what prompted me to open Pediatric Housecalls was, I've been practicing at that point for about seven years in the area and I saw a hole in the market, nothing like this existed in the Charlotte area.

Sara DuMond (03:15):
And I thought if I don't Jump on this, somebody else is gonna is gonna do this. That's the short answer. I think the long answer really has to do with the heart and soul of who we are as a practice. And it was really the fact that I was noticing in inside myself just a need, or a longing, for a way to practice medicine differently. I'd been with the same private group practice for the seven years since I'd finished residency and I love the practice. I loved my patients, I love my staff, but there was just something in me that just really craved more freedom, more flexibility, more autonomy in the way that I practiced. I just wasn't sure what that was going to look like. I certainly wasn't initially envisioning a house called practice. I just knew that I was getting to the end of my workdays and just feeling increasingly restless and a bit disenfranchised with office space medicine.

Sara DuMond (04:10):
I felt like I really was getting to the end of my day and really couldn't point to anything that I'd done well. And it wasn't that my patients were complaining or staff is complaining. I just, it was something that was, really just a feeling of not being completely fulfilled in my career at the end of the day. And so add to that that I, um, I'm a mother hand at the time. I was juggling a, you know, my career with three small children. And so I couldn't quite put my finger on, maybe it's that, maybe it's just that I'm having a hard time juggling it, and maybe it is the career thing, I'm not sure. But I did, I guess, at that time what any self respecting budding entrepreneur does and I got my laptop out and I started googling alternative ways to practice medicine or nontraditional ways to practice medicine.

Sara DuMond (04:59):
And lo and behold, I discovered that there were models for this type of practice. I exactly the same model that we use today, but there were house call practices scattered throughout the country and I came across other ideas for starting practices, but there was something about the house calls based practice that really intrigued me. And so, yeah, so I just started researching it and I thought this is, I can do this, this is something that I can do. And again, there's, there's nothing like this in the Charlotte area and I feel like as a mother, this is something I would want for my children. And this really makes sense to me. And so yeah, so that's kind of where it all began.

Joe Taylor Jr. (05:43):
I think for many professionals the evolution of a practice into a business, recruiting the talent that you need to execute on the promise. What's it like for you to find, to bring into your practice who can deliver the level of care and the level of patient experience that you expect? What's bringing folks to come to work with Pediatrics Housecalls?

Sara DuMond (06:09):
That's a great question. And honestly I would put that at the top of my list of things that were really daunting when I started first envisioning how this was going to be structured and in the things that I would need to put in place as how am I going to find the right people who are interested in doing this. It's certainly not a traditional way to practice medicine. So it's not for everyone. But also, like you said, that had the skillset and the experience and expertise that I felt was required to practice in such an autonomous way. And the, the level of comfort to be able to enter someone's home. And then my practice actually has another layer of complexity to it in that one of the ways that I was envisioning this practice working was, although Charlotte is not a big city by some city standards, it's still a very spread out city and one of the challenges of doing house calls, it's just the time and travel involved in getting from home to home.

Sara DuMond (07:08):
And so to be the most efficient at what we would do, I really felt like it made the most sense to find different providers to sort of divide the city up into different quadrants if you will, geographically, and assign different quadrants or different areas of the city to those providers. And so not only did I need to find the right people, but I needed to find the right people who lived in the right part of Charlotte. So, I wasn't really sure, honestly, I knew that I believe deeply and I was very excited about the idea. And I thought I just have to jump in. I just have to put it out there and I just have to tell people what I'm doing. And I decided just to be as transparent as possible and say, hey, we're starting this from the ground up.

Sara DuMond (07:52):
We don't have all the details completely hammered out yet, but this is what I envision it looking like. And, much to my surprise, the response was really overwhelming. We were just inundated with candidates wanting to talk to us and wanting to learn more about the practice. And I think part of that honestly is we're not, we've had many people. If you go to our website, you'll, one of the most obvious things you'll notice right away is that we're an all female practice. We're not just an all female practice. We're an all a mom, a professional practice. We're all mothers. I do think there's something inherent about this model of practice that appeals to other mothers. And I think that that played a role in the team that I have been able to put together. These specific women reaching out to me. I think there was something about this as, not just as a professional, but also as a mother that resonated with them.

Joe Taylor Jr. (08:49):
So given the healthcare these days seems to be a very competitive, and sometimes confusing, enterprise to a lot of consumers. How do your patients discover you? How are they learning that you even exist and what do you think is causing patients to gravitate toward practice as opposed to staying with whoever they've been seeing?

Sara DuMond (09:14):
So an important distinction that I want to make is we really do focus specifically on acute care, sick care only. So we are not looking to replace traditional pediatric practices. We're really looking to replace emergency departments and urgent care centers for things that can be cared for safely in the home. So from that perspective, it's been a little bit easier to find our place in the community because we're not coming in and saying we're going to be all things to all people. We're saying we're going to fill this particular need- and that's when your child is sick, we want you to think of us first. And, as for how we've been able to reach out to the community and make them aware of us, it's really been like any other business. It's been mostly through word of mouth and social media. That's just been our big platform and once we put ourselves out there on social media, what we discovered is that the parent community, the mom community in Charlotte really rallied behind us and exactly what I was hoping for and we're just being transparent and saying this is who we are, this is what we're doing and this is the reason that we're doing this.

Sara DuMond (10:26):
It really struck a chord. And then the mom community, I can't say enough, the online mom community in Charlotte just really took our social media presence and just kind of turned it viral, so to speak. And that's really been the way that we've, that we've grown. It's just by word of mouth that way, the way that we prefer to grow, to be honest. It just sort of that organic growth, one person using us and having a great experience and then telling their neighbor or sharing on their social media and it's just sort of spiraled from there.

Joe Taylor Jr. (11:00):
So tell me, compared to a typical visit to a doctor's office, what's distinctive about the patient experience from the moment that a parent would book an appointment online through to a practitioner showing up at someone's?

Sara DuMond (11:17):
Okay. So many things. First off, one of the other things that I was really somewhat obsessed with when I was creating Pediatric Housecalls was really, again, thinking with my mom brain, not necessarily with my pediatrician brain in terms of how can I set this up to make everything as simple as possible. You know, I've been up all night with a fussy child who is miserable. I'm exhausted, they're exhausted. What's the easiest, simplest, way to access care for my child? And so I'm an online shopper. I do everything on Amazon. I do my Christmas shopping online. So I knew I wanted to be able to make us accessible for appointment scheduling online. So we were able to find a platform to make that happen. So that's the first difference, I think. You're not calling a front office and waiting for the receptionist or maybe being put on hold and waiting for them to pull up the doctor's schedule and waiting through the office to open at 8:00 or 9:00 AM.

Sara DuMond (12:20):
You literally can log on to our website at anytime, day or night. It doesn't matter and you can view our schedule in real time. So if it's 2:00 AM and you're just thinking, goodness gracious, I need an appointment first thing in the morning, you can log onto our website and see, oh I can see I've got a provider available and they've got an 8:00 am appointment. I'm going to go ahead and get that book right now. And all of that can be done online, on your own time from your laptop, from your smartphone. So, we have a little tagline that we use and it's a it's a little saying life just got a little easier. And again, it really is what drove me in the beginning I just became obsessive about making it easy as possible. So that's probably the first difference. In terms of how you can schedule an appointment. By the way, we've also, since, in just in the last several months, introduced text scheduling, just because we thought that would offer one more way to be super easy and simple for parents and since we're all constantly going from through our days texting these days, we thought that would be another option. The next way aside from scheduling that is going to be starkly different from the experience in an office is that we are operating each of these visits on our own. So most people are used to first getting through the front office staff and checking in, maybe registering their insurance information and then you're taken back by a medical assistant or a nurse and getting your weight and your height and your vital signs. And then you're put in a room. This way, the way we do it, I come to your door, it's me. It's me and only me. And so I'm taking the information. I'm the one that's weighing you. I'm the one that's, you know, taking your child's temperature. I'm doing the entire visit, start to finish, just me. That has an interesting side effect and in a good way. It's obviously, it's less a stressful for a child to be examined by a physician in their own home. They're in a place that's familiar to them many times they're, you know, under their favorite blanket on the couch, you know, snuggled in front of their favorite cartoon. And so they're maybe not even noticing half the time that we're there. But there's a familiarity that is bred from the minute we walk in the door just because we are the ones that are having contact with them from start to finish. So I think just those two things, the scheduling portion of it, they are accessibility and the way that they access us and then just the familiarity and the comfort and the ease of the tile, just being able to be in there or the most comfortable environment. That's a huge difference from the sterile, you know, often uncomfortable. Often, you know, a very time consuming experience that can happen in a, in an office setting.

Joe Taylor Jr. (15:07):
So given that you've been redefining the patient experience and redefining the experience for the parents of your patients, tell me a little bit about some of the obstacles that you've had to overcome, especially within your industry. I imagine that insurance agencies probably have a lot of questions about your operation here.

Sara DuMond (15:29):
Yeah. Another great question. I mean, aside from the logistical challenges that we faced initially and just setting it up and how's this all gonna work and how are we going to divide up the city and put our team together and come up with a scheduling platform. Those were the logistical challenges, but you're absolutely right. There are definitely been some challenges in terms of people understanding what we do and what role we see ourselves playing in this community. Charlotte's got a very, very rich, wonderful medical community. Many of the pediatric practices in the area have been around for decades, since the middle of the 20th century, if not before. And so it's steeped and rich tradition. Many of the families, you know, they were taken care of at this particular practice when they were children and now they're bringing their children to the same practice. And so there's definitely a, you know, we've seen some, some, not even skepticism, but maybe just some hesitancy in terms of, wait a minute- who are you, what are you doing? You seem to be sort of disrupting what we're used to and this very traditional community. And so that's definitely been a challenge that we've had to overcome. And the way we've addressed that is really just try, again, by trying to be as transparent and forthcoming and as we can about what we, what we want to be doing. And I'm Explaining to people that we were not trying to replace your, your regular pediatrician. We're really trying to offer a convenient and hopefully more cost effective- if you're looking at this from a public health perspective- a cost effective, saving health care dollars alternative to some of the more pricey things that you might seek out when you have a sick child.

Sara DuMond (17:16):
I think we also have have made some mistakes along the way and have had to course correct in terms of communicating with the pediatric practices. So that's one of our top goals is making sure that any of the care that we provide, that that's getting translated back whether it's in the form of a fax note or a digitally transmitted note- but that we're sharing information freely with their regular pediatrician so that they can keep it all in one place so that they know their child has been cared for by someone outside of their practice. And if they have any, questions, they can see right in front of them. This is what we diagnosed, this is what we did and this is how you can reach out to us if you have questions. We're really, really hoping to just continue to have a very collaborative relationship with these other practices in town.

Joe Taylor Jr. (18:03):
I can imagine that your leveraging quite a bit of technology to be able to communicate effectively with all of the different kinds of practices and organizations you touch on. What are some of the tools that allow you to stay organized?

Sara DuMond (18:17):
Yeah. So you're absolutely right. It's actually one of the things I think it's so ironic and that I love about what we do. House calls fell out of favor- I don't know- somewhere in the fifties & sixties range. Most of our parents, at least in my generation, can remember having a doctor come to their house when they were little and that was sort of the norm. And I think technology was one of the big things that sort of took the house call out of the game, meaning that as medical technological advances came, came onto the scene became almost impossible to take that technology into the home. It made much more sense for patients to go to where the technology was, and most of the time that meant an office near a hospital or a university setting.

Sara DuMond (19:03):
And so, what's fun for me to think about is that we're bringing back an old fashioned style of medicine in the way that we're able to bring it back is actually through technology. It's sort of like a full circle thing here. But the platforms that we use, gosh, we've got a great first off the scheduling platform that we are able to use. It's customizable so we can customize, visit duration, length of time. We can customize according to how much time it's going to take, getting in between one patient's home to the next. We have a HIPAA compliant because that's a big thing obviously, making sure that we keep all of the patient information secure and compliant with the HIPAA laws. So we have HIPAA compliant apps that we use to collect and share information.

Sara DuMond (19:50):
The same thing in terms with each other within the practice, but also with the practices whose patients were seeing. So yeah, there are several that I could just sort of rattle off a list. There are several different, they don't necessarily all integrate, but that we've been able to make work together so that it's as seamless and as organized as possible because there are a lot of moving parts. When you've got different practitioners working in different parts of the city all independently, all for the same practice it has the potential to be very disorganized and very disjointed. We've had to be very, very thoughtful and calculated about how we've set everything up.

Joe Taylor Jr. (20:34):
I think that's a segue into another thing that I wanted to talk about with you which is- for building this kind of business. Any kind of practitioner in the business always has that temptation to work in the business more than they work on the business and that you find your day includes working with patients directly, but also thinking about how you're going to market the practice and how you're going to expand or how are you going to take care of some staffing issues. So tell me a little bit more about how your managing your day so that you have the right balance between working with patients and working with your team on the business itself.

Sara DuMond (21:15):
That's such a great question- and it's one that I will tell you right off the bat I did. a horrible job of initially. I went to medical school to be a doctor. That's my comfort zone. That's what I know. And so the idea of devoting a portion of my day to anything other than patient care was completely foreign to me. I was definitely not prepared for how much time that would take away from my patient care. And what I've found works for me, and this may not work for everyone, but for me, it just all comes down to scheduling and carving out intentional time. One of the things I love about our scheduling platform is that each one of us is in charge of our own patients schedule.

Sara DuMond (22:00):
So we don't have a centralized scheduling system. So literally every single one of us, myself and the other pediatrician that works with me in the six nurse practitioners are all in charge of their online schedule availability. So that means that if I need to, my schedule can be changed by me. I don't have to, it doesn't have, if there's not a centralized scheduling system that would be just completely disrupted if I find that I've got to work a meeting into my schedule, so I'm going to have to block off an hour of patient care to do that. That's been extremely helpful. But I try the more and more I get into this really just a dedicated specific portions of each day towards administrative and business and marketing type activities. I've also, of course as you can probably imagine, started to just bit by bit bring people in to assist me with that. So that's not my skill set, that's not really my strongest suit. And so I want to reach out to the people that that's what they do. So I've been really, really lucky in being able to bring people in and join my team that that's their dedicated job and they do it well. So I'm able to focus more of my time on patient care, which is what I want to be doing.

Joe Taylor Jr. (23:15):
And so thinking a little bit again about growing a team. What are the signals that somebody sends to you when you are recruiting or hiring that make you really understand that someone's gonna be a good fit for the team and what are some of the red flags that would make you say, maybe this person is going to be better suited to a more traditional practice?

Sara DuMond (23:35):
Yeah. So I think a couple of things. One obviously is I can tell immediately when someone is inquiring about practice whether they're inquiring because they're job hunting and we're just number five on their list of places to touch base with or they're inquiring about us because they are truly intrigued, they are truly wanting to know more about what we do. There's something about us that really strikes a chord with them from an inside out perspective that that's the first thing. The second thing is that we are, we are still evolving. We are still course correcting from time to time. We are still making changes and we don't feel like we've perfected this just yet. And so, that takes a certain kind of- don't know if it's a personality type- or just a person who's at a certain stage in their career in terms of having the experience to bring on board. But not everyone is going to be comfortable with that degree of change.

Sara DuMond (24:40):
You know, a lot of people need the the written protocols, the schedule in place that you know, when you're taking your time off and what that written policies is like and you liked that chain of command and sort of a very structured environment. This is definitely more organic and more flow and more collaborative. My team of providers get together as regularly as we can and it's kind of more sort of like a hangout session. Like just let's brainstorm. What ideas did they have that maybe they're seeing when they're out seeing patients that could really make the practice better. And so I'm always looking for somebody who is open to that, who's open to change, who is willing to participate and collaborate and isn't necessarily just looking for something to fill their time and in a way, you know, in a job quite frankly.

Joe Taylor Jr. (25:35):
And with everyone working remotely, essentially, one of the things that you develop as a leader is that ability to see in real time everything that's going on in your business. So how do you ensure that the quality of that patient experience is consistent and how do you ensure that everyone on your team is having a consistently strong, good experience in the practice?

Sara DuMond (26:00):
Well a couple of, a couple ways that we handle that mean one is by trying to get together and regularly meet as much as possible. We're establishing certain guidelines and certain standards; when a patient's schedules an appointment, this is the expectation in terms of how quickly you'll call them back. And this is the expectation in terms of, what would you want on your end as a mother. Would you, in terms of the provider reaching out to you and then in terms of things like follow-up and notification of labs, that kind of thing. So we've definitely had to put in place just certain basic standards and expectations. So that kind of sets a minimum expectation across the board. But I'm in constant conversation with all of my team members every single day. Someone reached out to me-- I actually get several of these types of calls or emails, it's interesting. There was a pediatrician out in the Idaho that had stumbled across our practice on, on the web and had questions and was really intrigued and said tell me about it. It just seems like such a fun way to practice and I'd love to be able to replicate this and do something similar. And you know, one of my pieces of advice to her was, it's great. I've never been happier. This is definitely what I was put here to do. This is definitely where I'm supposed to be, but understand that, this type of a practice demands that you're really available at all times just because your practitioners aren't necessarily seeing patients at all hours of the day and night doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to be needed.

Sara DuMond (27:34):
Whether it's reviewing notes, all of our charting and our notes are kept electronically in one platform. And so I'm doing those notes sometimes 9:00 or 10:00 at night just to kind of make sure that we're all on the same page clinically. It does require quite a bit of oversight on my part. But again, I circle back to that initial process of bringing the right people on board and being comfortable. I'm not going to bring somebody on board that I'm not comfortable with their level of experience, with their number of years of experience, and the type of experience that they've had, the type of clinical experience, the settings that they've worked in. And then we also rely on patient feedback. I'll be honest, I mean, it really has been pretty, pretty wonderful feedback across the board and I share that when there's something specific that a parent shares with us that they appreciated.

Sara DuMond (28:33):
I'm going to share that specific piece of feedback with that particular provider and say listen, this really went a long way with this mother. This really she couldn't get over that you did x, y, or z thing and this really meant a lot to her. Let's get into that. What do you think that is, you know, how do you think that we could translate that into so that we can all adopt that in our style practice? So I'm sort of constantly in communication from that perspective as well.

Joe Taylor Jr. (28:59):
So given that this kind of a budiness scales based on the size and the quality of the team, how big of a practice, do you foresee building business continue to grow? Do grow just within Charlotte or do you think you'd start to export this to other cities?

Sara DuMond (29:15):
So I mean first and foremost our mission is based in Charlotte. I mean there's no question about that. This is the community of parents who supported us so graciously from the very get go almost surprisingly so, So number one, we want to make sure that we are never able to perfect medicine, but that we're perfecting the process of what we're giving them as much as possible in this community and giving them the very best of what we had before we ever think about expanding beyond Charlotte. When I started Pediatric Housecalls, it was myself initially- by myself and then I've just gradually brought on more practitioners and, people ask me all the time, did you know you wanted a team of eight? Did you kind of, did you do the math and sort of geographically look at the number of zip codes in Charlotte and calculate it out and I actually didn't. Pediatric Housecalls has grown very organically, through demand. And so when certain areas of the city were reaching out to us and saying, hey we've got this whole, all these communities down here. We would love to be able to access your care if you can find someone that would be willing to come out to our area. And so, demand really has been what's driven our growth. It wasn't necessarily part of our original business model to have eight providers on board and to cover 32 zip codes in the Charlotte area. but it's really just how it's evolved organically. And so, to that end we are, we were receiving on a daily, weekly basis those kinds of requests and that kind of feedback from communities outside of Charlotte that are really, really interested in like, gosh, I wish we had this where I live. Is there any way that you all would ever think about expanding? And so I will say that it's definitely on our radar screen, but it's just not our top mission. Our mission is always going to be Charlotte. And if the demand in these other areas is such that we feel like we were doing the best in getting the best that we can the Charlotte area and we're ready to move into other markets and other other cities or other areas or surrounding Charlotte, then we'll definitely look at doing that.

Joe Taylor Jr. (31:21):
Well, knowing that we're almost out of time, what else should our listeners know about you and the business that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet?

Sara DuMond (31:28):
So one of my favorite things to share, that I think usually makes people raise their eyebrows and say, wait a minute- what? I'm one of my favorite things that I had to share about the practices that we don't have advertised ours and we don't have advertised all people say, what hours can I get a house call?

Sara DuMond (31:46):
We don't have advertised hours. I give 100 percent autonomy to our providers in terms of creating their own dream schedule. This was my dream practice. This is my dream job. And along the way I'd like to bring other providers in to be able to create their dream job working for me. And so to that end, you we have some of our practitioners who the early morning hours work best for their schedule, whether that's for family commitments, what have you, but they're seeing patients at 5:30, 6:00 AM. We have other practitioners that are seeing patients late at night. So I'm just sticking to traditional hours. But a lot of people raised their eyebrows and say, how does that work? How can that work? What do you mean? How can you possibly run a business where you don't even have any advertised hours. And when it's not set.

Sara DuMond (32:33):
People can't depend on you. And what I say is, again, I circle back to one of our core missions is that we're not trying to be everything to everyone at all times. We know this is this was our dream. This is my dream job. This is my dream practice. So I'm kind of creating it to mirror what I had in my head is the perfect work life balance. The perfect interaction with my staff. And so, what's funny is that what most business people I think, not necessarily with any clinical experience but a businessperson looking in from the outside would probably say that's never gonna work. You're never going to make this fly if you don't have more standardized, more set hours. You can't change your schedule week to week and day to day. That's just never going to work. And I love the fact that it does work. And I think again, that speaks to people really understanding us, understanding what we're about, what's at our core, what our mission is, and wanting to support that. Wanting to see us succeed. It's more than just a business for us.

Joe Taylor Jr. (33:38):
Yeah. I can understand that criticism if folks are trying to compare apples to apples with an urgent care facility or one of the many clinics that are showing up inside pharmacies or drug stores. But I also think one of the challenges with healthcare right now is really just getting onto the schedule so may not necessarily matter that you don't have a storefront with an open sign or a standard hours of operation, as long as parents are able to go in and schedule the appointment. As far as they're concerned, the time of that appointment is the only time that they're concerned about.

Sara DuMond (34:21):
Yeah exactly. You're absolutely right about that. But it's something that's unique. Obviously it sets us apart. And again, I liked the idea sort of being unpredictable and surprising in that way and saying, guess what, it actually does work. It actually does resonate. It actually does. It's getting traction, despite conventional wisdom.

Joe Taylor Jr. (34:43):
Fantastic. Dr Sara DuMond, thank you so much for joining us this week on The Build.

Sara DuMond (34:48):
Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Taylor Jr. (34:50):
Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Build. Our producer is Katie Cohen Zahniser. Our production coordinator is Nicole Hubbard. Our production team for this episode included Amelia Lohmann, Jess Ryan, Faiza Samreen, Gianna Seeney and April Smith. Podfly Productions manages our postproduction and our theme music is performed by Arrows and Sound. I'm Joe Taylor Jr.

Announcer (35:13):
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Build. We hope you'll share this series with your friends and provide us with feedback on the itunes store.