A mother of two young boys, Ellen da Silva said she and other parents in the U.S. feel “the existing pediatric care infrastructure is generally underserved.” She and her husband waited hours in the emergency room for answers to simple questions about their children’s health, sometimes days for the pediatrician to call back.
This worrying cycle of trouble is why she and co-founder Matthew Woo launched summer health last week. They created the New York City-based startup to deliver pediatric care via text message to get one step closer to realizing their vision: Every American has a phone number in their pocket, and they can get medical care via text message in 15 minutes .
DaSilva becomes eighth employee after working at Barclays and Twitter his and hers In 2018, first as business development director for a telemedicine company and later as head of strategic partnerships. She shared in an interview that she left the company last year with a clear understanding of the telehealth industry and saw the need to digitize pediatric care mature.
The other six full-time employees working at Summer Health also have healthcare and technology expertise — they come from a range of companies from Uber to Boston Children’s Hospital to Microsoft.
Together, the team built a platform that connects parents with licensed pediatricians via text message within 15 minutes. Often, when parents observe a potential health issue in their child, they either sink down a rabbit hole of Google information that doesn’t reassure them, or go to their pediatrician’s office, which may be understaffed to respond in a timely manner, according to Dasi Just in time, said Ilva.
Summer Health’s mission is to simplify the process and provide parents with more timely options for answering questions about their children’s health, she said. When she came up with the startup’s name, DaSilva was “thinking about words that mean happiness and evoke good feelings, and make people want to embrace it rather than trudge through what we call ‘the winter of the healthcare system.’ ”
Parents can use the platform to address urgent needs, such as sending a photo of a child with a new rash to the pediatrician and asking if they should be concerned. They can also use the platform to help meet their child’s developmental needs. For example, parents can ask clinicians for advice about their toddler’s sleep degeneration or guidance about their teen’s mood swings.
Summer Health didn’t disclose the number of pediatricians currently on its platform, but DaSilva did say that the startup was facing “overwhelming demand” from pediatricians who wanted to join the platform, so much so that it created a waitlist. She said the company will continue to expand its reach by recruiting these clinicians, paying particular attention to their geographic diversity and the quality of clinical expertise.
In the process of striving to continue to develop, the company has get $7.50 seed capital from well-known investors.Seed round by Alfred Lin at Sequoia Capital with Deena Shakir in Lux Capital. Chelsea Clinton’s Metrodora Ventures, Box Group, Coalition Partners, Shrug Capital and Springbank Collective also participated.
Summer Health will use the funding to expand its employee base and the number of pediatricians on its platform so that more parents can use its text messaging service.
“What I had the opportunity to see during my time at Twitter was a desire for immediacy and accessible information,” DaSilva said. “A lot of paediatric care is ensuring parents have peace of mind through a reliable source of information. There are many message-based products that are robotic or AI-based, but we understand that this is not the care parents really want for their children.”
Summer Health is currently available nationwide as a public beta program. Its service costs $20 per month.
Image credit: Summer Health
