Kudos to their founders and team for trying to disrupt this space.<p><a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/brave-care">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/brave-care</a><p><a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2021/10/07/brave-care-25m.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2021/10/07/brave-c...</a> | <a href="https://archive.today/Qd8fQ" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/Qd8fQ</a><p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/09/yc-backed-brave-care-raises-5-million-for-pediatric-urgent-care-clinics/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/09/yc-backed-brave-care-raise...</a>
I have heard conflicting accounts of inefficiencies in the US healthcare system.<p>One account is that the US has too many medical facilities in urban areas. In other words, there might be five hospitals each with its own radiology equipment. That equipment is idle some of the time, so you could close some of the imaging departments and leave just one or two for the metro area. That would obviously inconvenience some people, but the gist of the criticism is that the US duplicates medical capacity for the sake of convenience.<p>The other criticism is that there are too few clinics and such. That's why there was a big push to open health clinics in pharmacies and urgent care locations recently.<p>Now I know these aren't mutually exclusive; you can have too few clinics and too many hospitals. But I would like to know if anyone is more informed than I am what validity there is to each criticism.<p>I'm curious what the truth is regarding the number and character of brick-and-mortar healthcare facilities in the US: too many? too few? Because it looks like this company was opening physical clinics.
OP here.<p>I visited their clinics for my daughter several times when she was a toddler for ear aches and other ailments— I found the experience refreshing: instant online booking, no BS registration and online communication with staff was seamless. Very sad to see them go so abruptly.<p>Up until this morning when I was told they were gone, I had no idea they were YC or otherwise VC funded. Just came here to pour one out for a genuinely helpful and pleasant medical company.
Sad to see a care organization like this shut down.
But curious to understand what exactly they were disrupting?
From the outset, looks like a pediatric clinic that accepts insurance (and has a cash pay option) - but this is how most pediatric clinics/urgent care that are not venture backed operate. There doesn’t seem to be a disruption in their revenue model (like a one medical style subscription service), and vbc doesn’t apply much to pediatric care.
Not criticisms, just trying to understand what the goal was.
Given the highly escalating price of medical care, it's astounding that a provider that isn't required by federal law to provide no-cost indigent care can go bankrupt.<p>[1] makes it sound like they were assuming a never-ending stream of venture funding and didn't make a sustainable business. It'd be interesting to see where the money went.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2022/09/portland-pediatrics-startup-brave-care-lays-off-a-third-of-staff-citing-covid-and-market-turmoil.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2022/09/portland-pediatr...</a>
Real way to fix healthcare: facilities based on repurposed container ships offshore near cities with lots of flights into them, to be outside of US regulations, staffed by physicians shuffled from Eastern Europe. Will offer more than an order of magnitude price advantage and will quickly squeeze the existing systems making it irrelevant until what's left of it is forced to change.
Don't get the wrong idea about this announcement.<p>The problem is not that pediatric urgent care is not a viable business.<p>The problem is that it's not a great VC-funded business.<p>VC investors are hoping for huge growth and eventually earning back multiples of their investment.<p>That's going to be really hard to do in this segment of the health-care market.<p>We've got a wonderful pediatric urgent-care place in our area, backed by the best children's hospital in our metro region, and it seems to be doing great. But does that mean it could ever grow at the rate needed to satisfy VC investors? Probably not.
I never used this service but based on their site. It's aimed at pediatric care?<p>With the decline in birth rates in the US, didn't seem like a sustainable model from the get go.