If you are lucky enough to have a doctor or a nurse in your family, you know how convenient it is to ask them about your medical ailments. Discussing coughs, sore throats, and weird skin spots are never off limits at family functions. But most people aren’t that lucky and need to be seen at a medical practice – until CirrusMD entered the picture with its HIPAA compliant telemedicine chat platform. CirrusMD aims to be like that doctor in your family, providing the advice of a licensed medical practitioner only seconds away via chat on your smartphone, and the service is typically free through your insurance company.
Dr. Alex Mohseni, a member of Launch Workplaces in Rockville, is one of the doctors you might connect with on the app. He is an emergency medicine physician who traded the frantic hospital emergency room for the frantic world of a startup technology company after joining Denver-based CirrusMD as one of its medical directors in November 2017.
While there are many telemedicine solutions in the marketplace offered by insurance companies, CirrusMD is different because it engages with patients first via text chat, and then transfers to video if necessary, which occurs less than 10% of the time. As Dr. Mohseni explains, text chats are a better solution for patients because there are no time limits on the encounters. While video chats can only last 10-15 minutes, text chats may last as long as patients want to stay engaged. Furthermore, a doctor can have multiple chats open at once, thus serving multiple patients at once. Finally, the chats are reviewed by a medical peer group and stored forever in the patient’s electronic medical record keeping everyone apprised of symptoms and recommendations. “It’s 100% transparent and that equates to higher quality medicine,” he says. Indeed, according to the company, over 80% of encounters resolved on the CirrusMD platform need no further follow up.
Dr. Mohseni is a self-described nerd who grew up programming games in Basic on the family’s IBM 8086. While his parents encouraged him to pursue a career in medicine, Alex always had an eye towards technology and entrepreneurism. To help pay for school at the University of Maryland, he started several side businesses with friends, including selling neckties and Ethernet cards. When he was working as a hospital emergency room physician, he was also the Chief Innovation Officer of the medical staffing company that placed him. However, 12 years of long hours in the hospital burned him out, so when he came across CirrusMD while researching telemedicine, he decided to make a career change and join their team.
Now that Alex is working only minutes away from his home at Launch Workplaces, he can spend more time with his family and with his passions which include learning new things, writing technology articles, and data analytics. He cites Lynda.com and podcasts by Tim Ferriss and Jason Calacanis as sources of inspiration as well as his fellow coworkers at Launch. “Being at Launch has been a great experience. I’ve met so many people doing really interesting stuff, and these relationships have led to potential business contacts and valuable leads,” he says.
If you wish to engage with a doctor via your smartphone, contact your insurance company and ask if they are on the CirrusMD chat platform. Maybe one day Dr. Alex Mohseni will be the expert that takes care of your medical needs!
