This Florida orthopedics center is changing the way we receive emergency care – NBC4 Washington

Picture this:

Your arm hurts and you take the day off to go to your local emergency room to have it checked out.

But once you get to the clinic, you find that you will need a second doctor’s visit, maybe a third, before you are seen by someone who specializes in the part of the body that is injured.

For Dr. Alejandro Badia, a Cuban-born orthopedic surgeon based in Florida, found the cat-and-mouse game patients must play to access healthcare experts was too common for comfort, so he took matters into his own hands to solve it .

Badia is the founder of OrthoNOW, a Florida-based, full-service emergency care company whose sole purpose is to simplify the way people find and access specialized emergency care.

Since its inception in 2012, OrthoNOW has grown to three centers in Miami with plans to expand internationally in the near future.

Although he is now a successful entrepreneur, Badia didn’t always plan to own his own orthopedic company.

Cuban blood, raised in New Jersey

Badia was born in Cuba, but remembers growing up in New Jersey from an early age.

“My father worked in a warehouse and my mother started teaching,” Badia explains.

“American kids were a little unruly, so she ended up working in a hospital because in Cuba we had a family tradition, lots of doctors, and that was my first exposure to medicine,” he said.

One of his first memories of medicine, especially orthopedic medicine, was when he was just 8 years old and accompanied his grandmother to the doctor who was treating her debilitating rheumatoid arthritis.

“Her hands were very deformed,” Badia said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a procedure that was very new, kind of considered experimental. And this doctor, Dr. Bob Carroll, saw her for this.”

“I remember sitting in the office and my feet were dangling,” Badia said. “I looked around at his certificates and said, ‘This would be really cool.’”

“I found out that Bob Carroll had trained Joseph Imbruglia,” he said. “Imbruglia trained me 20 years later in Pittsburgh at Allegheny General Hospital. So it’s a small world.”

Shoot for the stars

As Badia grew older, he focused on different talents to get into college, specifically swimming, soccer and even a bit of ballroom dancing.

But it wasn’t until he met his dermatologist as a teenager that he thought he would “shoot for the stars” and apply to study at an Ivy League institution.

“He opened my eyes to shooting for the stars and being really ambitious,” Badia said.

“My guidance counselor, which can be typical of an inner-city public school, didn’t even present that option to me, probably because I wasn’t in the top three or four of my class,” Badia said.

Badia was admitted to Cornell University in New York. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in animal physiology in 1985, then to NYU for medical school and later to Pittsburgh for his medical fellowship.

“When I did my fellowship in Pittsburgh, it was an upper extremity fellowship. So I’ve been doing hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder surgeries from the very beginning,” Badia said.

Get into private practice

After completing his fellowships, Badia opened his first business in Miami in 1995.

“I saw Miami at the time as having a cosmopolitan future,” Badia said. ‘I wanted to go somewhere where I could use my Spanish. Of course, since I’m Cuban, there are some Cubans here in Miami.”

In the Miami suburb of Doral, Badia co-founded the Miami Hand Center, his first business, where it grew to four partners. He stayed there for fourteen years before leaving to start his own practice.

“I went on my own and had to build my own operations center, which is a big job,” Badia said.

“I realized that as healthcare changes, I should have my own kind of emergency room, you know, an entry point into a funnel for patients,” Badia added.

He then opened a location of DoctorsNow, an urgent care center franchise.

“The concept of orthopedic emergency care had not really been developed yet,” Badia explained. “They were based in the Midwest and they failed miserably.”

“I was competing with a big hospital that had a very big name to this day,” Badia added.

That location struggled and closed a year after opening.

“I couldn’t get a franchise going with all the material and knowledge there? Maybe entrepreneurship is just not for me,” Badia said as he thought.

An idea was born

Despite her hesitation on that first entrepreneurial journey, Badia knew one thing was clear: Patients lost a lot of time (and money) scheduling appointments with experts at major hospitals after their first visit.

“My ambition was that the patient would be seen by some sort of orthopedic specialist from the start, that this would save time and money,” he said.

That’s why Badia created OrthoNOW, a one-stop orthopedic emergency care where patients could consult with an orthopedic expert from the start instead of wasting time scheduling additional appointments at a traditional urgent care.

“If you go to a general emergency room, it’s very convenient. Yes, it’s very dedicated. Doctors are there or at the mid-level,” Badia explained. “The problem is that all those people are not trained in musculoskeletal medicine, so you end up making additional care trips instead of solving the problem on that first visit.”

“The idea with OrthoNOW is the convenience of a walk-in urgent care center, but you have expertise in all of the musculoskeletal medicine,” Badia said.

So how does OrthoNOW make it easier for patients to reach healthcare experts? It all comes down to the company’s proprietary app that allows doctors to contact Badia in seconds.

“It’s an award-winning app where they contact me through the app and only send the x-ray and clinical history if it’s very complex, they want an opinion from me or because it’s something that requires surgical intervention.”

And this works with any OrthoNOW specialist, including hand, spine, foot or ankle specialists, Badia explained.

Within the app, patients can do a variety of things, including chatting with doctors, referring new patients, or even taking a ride to the nearest Ortho NOW center.

“We’ve partnered with Uber and now Lyft so you can actually call them within our app… if you don’t necessarily want to drive yourself,” Badia explains.

“So these are all elements of the app that are designed to make the delivery of orthopedic care seamless.”

Since its founding, OrthoNOW has grown steadily and transitioned to a licensing model. The company currently has three centers in Miami and expects to open a center in Alaska, with plans for an international location in the Dominican Republic.

Badia was interviewed for Bísness School, a series that tells the inspiring stories of Latino founders. Subscribe to Bísness School wherever you get your podcasts to receive future episodes automatically. Remember, business school is expensive. Bísness School is free.