Dr. Alejandro Badia and OrthoNOW were featured in DISRUPT MAGAZINE
We are sharing sections of that article so that you can enjoy the essence of it. To read the entire piece, please refer to the link at the bottom of this Ortho article.
Doral Specialized Orthopedic Urgent Care Center: How Did It All Begin?
In 2010, Dr. Badia’s frustration with the health care system sparked the idea for the creation of specialized orthopedic urgent care centers to efficiently assess and treat a range of orthopedic and sports injuries. OrthoNOW is an immediate orthopedic care center where everything from acute injury to pain is addressed in virtually any musculoskeletal condition.
The few exceptions are major injuries in patients who cannot ambulate, such as a hip fracture in the elderly. While OrthoNOW is certainly not “new,” in terms of ideas, Dr. Badia still had to be quite innovative in creating community engagement and facilitating a behavior change.
“The problem has simply been that the local hospital systems have no interest in this succeeding, and even the insurance companies, who most stand to benefit due to cost, are not engaged since their salaried employees are not interested in change,” explained the doctor.
Why Creating This New Concept for Immediate Orthopedic Walk-In Clinic?
“I founded this concept because nearly every patient who saw me in my hand and upper limb practice, Badia Hand to Shoulder Center, had been somewhere else first- and that place did very little to diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. This includes the primary care doctor, general urgent care, and the busy and expensive emergency room.”
“In fact, many times that person would gain an appointment with the recommended orthopedic surgeon only to be told, ‘I do knees but don’t know much about the wrist.’”
Why Is OrthoNOW A Unique Concept And What Problems Does It Solve?
OrthoNOW sorts all this out and uses their award-winning OrthoNOW mobile app to communicate in real-time to the right sub-specialist as one cannot expect a foot surgeon, knee surgeon, spine specialist, hand surgeon, etc. to all be sitting in a walk-in clinic, waiting for the appropriate patient to walk…or rather… limp in.”
This is a simple concept, yet the public has, until now, failed to grasp it, unlike Uber, Tinder, or some other app from a phone.” This is the reason we recently went to market since a large healthcare company, innovation-minded, is needed to take this national, and even international,” said Dr. Badia.
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Should you want to read the entire article, please visit this page.