24-hour telemedicine company launches in Las Vegas
Concierge doctors don’t have to be a luxury, with this company attempting to make the service widely available around the clock for Las Vegas residents.
Hermes Health, launched in the Las Vegas and the San Francisco Bay area in October, is a 24-hour, on-demand telemedicine service offering concierge health care over the phone.
“We’re trying to create a service that is accessible to a broader demographic of people,” said founder and emergency room doctor Alex Lin. “We’re trying to really connect our resources as physicians with the general public and provide a more premium kind of concierge level of care at a more affordable price.”
Hermes Health offers three calls per month for patients and can do just about anything a general practitioner or urgent care can do for a patient: like prescribing medicine, schedule screenings or just talk through things. Calls can be scheduled, but are typically on-demand.
No doctors offices, no receptionist or triage nurses and virtually no wait times — according to Lin, wait times for patients calls are typically less than five minutes.
According to Lin, they have built relationships with multiple imaging centers and labs throughout the Las Vegas Valley to help patients get a cheaper cash price.
“You won’t have to wait for your insurance to approve what sort of imaging you want,” said Lin. “For example, you hurt your shoulder, let’s say, and it’s bothering you. We can, probably, get you that image in 24 hours for like, $400 paid directly to the imaging center.”
Sick in the middle of the night? Hermes Health also works with a courier service to get prescription medication in the wee hours of the night.
Plans at Hermes Health start at $250 for an individual plan, which gets customers three calls a month with an ER physician. There are also family plans available, which starts at $300 a month, plus $50 per person added on. Patients can also add “a la carte” calls as needed.
If patients don’t use the calls, the plan will automatically expire after six months.
Payments are all out of pocket. Patients can pay for their plans with cash, their Health Care Service Account or Flexible Spending Account.
According to Lin, patients with high deductibles or independent contractors who lack insurance might even see cheaper prices with Hermes Health, rather than going through insurance.
Lin himself worked at University Medical Center for around three years and multiple other emergency rooms across the valley before moving to the Bay Area. What he experienced firsthand in Las Vegas showed him the “problem with access to care,” which led him to founding Hermes Health.
“Realistically, in Las Vegas, there just aren’t enough doctors for all the people that need it,” said Lin.
Lin said he saw people with non-urgent issues, like high cholesterol, going to the ER because they lacked a primary care doctor. This then stains the system, but also does not provide followup for the patient and then further exacerbates the issue, he said.
Currently, they are testing the markets in the Las Vegas and Bay Area, but hope to expand to more locations as demand grows. In Las Vegas, they have around 50 total users and four doctors available around the clock to serve patients.
Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.
