Medicast Files IPO Prospectus: On-Demand House Call Platform Poised for Public Debut

When illness strikes, most people face a common frustration: to see a doctor for a single condition, you may need to get up at 5 a.m. to queue for registration. If you are lucky enough that the staff at the window do not tell you “today’s appointments are fully booked” when your turn comes, you earn the right to wait another hour or two outside the consultation room. Ultimately, however, the time the physician spends on diagnosis is often only about five minutes.

Imagine this: you are working in a different city and suddenly develop a fever, nausea, and headache while staying at a hotel in an unfamiliar place. At that moment, you can take out your smartphone, open the app, and request a doctor to come to you. Within an hour, the doctor arrives, performs an examination using basic diagnostic tools, and administers an injection. By the next day, you have recovered and feel revitalized!

This is no longer a private physician service reserved exclusively for the wealthy; it is now available in Miami, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Founded on January 1, 2013, in Palo Alto, California, by two former Nokia colleagues and a chief physician, this company—dubbed the “Uber of healthcare”—primarily provides hospitals and health systems with a convenient and efficient technology platform. It collaborates to help doctors and patients establish a modernized medical service network. It is also currently the world’s only mobile-first logistics and management platform that delivers on-demand medical services. Medicast is precisely such a company: based on the patient’s location, users can easily complete a few steps on their mobile phones to have a doctor arrive at their office, hotel, home, or any other location within two hours. (Uber is a U.S.-based ride-hailing service app.)

Medicast Usage Process
Users utilize the Medicast App, website, or telephone to submit requests for physicians to provide house calls at their homes, offices, or hotels;
As required, licensed physicians will conduct an initial consultation with patients via telephone, during which patients will describe their symptoms;
The physician will arrive at the patient's location within two hours to provide emergency treatment;
Doctors are available for consultations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on call and ready to provide services at all times.

Medicast User Base
The company’s primary user base consists of doctors and patients. For patients, it mainly addresses non-urgent conditions, such as minor issues like colds or bleeding from needle sticks; in severe cases, patients are still advised to seek care in the emergency room. The company not only provides medical consultation services to patients but also creates opportunities for young physicians, opening new avenues for those seeking to increase their income and gain practical experience.

Medicast collaborates with hospitals, and its current platform features experts in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), internal medicine, pediatrics, geriatrics, and other specialties, enabling basic physical examinations and emergency treatment. Physicians can prescribe medications directly during home visits, thereby enhancing user convenience by eliminating the need to purchase drugs at pharmacies. Doctors joining Medicast must undergo a rigorous vetting process. Medicast employs a dedicated team to conduct background checks, ensuring that physicians hold government-recognized medical practice licenses and prescribing privileges. The team also verifies criminal records and sex offender registries, rejecting candidates with adverse records. This approach alleviates users’ safety concerns regarding in-home medical services.

Medicast Product Line
The company currently has four products:
1. Patient App: One-Touch Connection to Doctors


Exquisitely designed and user-friendly iOS and Android client apps enable patients to access in-home nursing care from healthcare providers with a single button press. The patient app also integrates an electronic medical record (EMR) system to manage patients' health records.

2. Virtual Practice: Mobile-Optimized Clinical Workflows


Clinicians can use this software, which integrates directly into electronic health record (EHR) systems and provides user-friendly mobile health tools for scheduling, charting, and billing.

3. Care Coordination: Seamless Scheduling and Arrangement of Physician Time


This is a scheduling portal that can intelligently dispatch physicians remotely based on actual needs, arrange home visits, or conduct telemedicine consultations on behalf of patients.

4. Administrative Module: Access to real-time updates on the telemedicine network


Customized dashboards enable administrators and care coordinators to manage clinicians in real time. They facilitate the tracking and management of healthcare providers, monitor their efficiency and clinical workflows, and generate data analytics reports covering patient information and clinical diagnoses.

Advantages of the Medicast Model
Medicast actually aligns with a relatively novel development model known as private healthcare, which is currently growing at an annual rate of 25%. Its core objective is to reduce costs associated with health insurance, while also allowing physicians more time to interact with patients. Payments for home visits are settled in cash and are not linked to health insurance. Furthermore, the need for nurses, receptionists, or even physical office spaces is eliminated, significantly lowering operational costs. User demand is also assured, as most individuals opt for discounted policies to save on health insurance expenses. They typically choose to visit medical institutions for serious conditions, while relying on Medicast for minor ailments, thereby helping to reduce overall health insurance expenditures.

Key Features of Medicast
1. Logistics Intelligence: Real-time management and intelligent scheduling of remote clinicians based on community, traffic, symptoms, and physician gender or language preferences.
2. Mobile Healthcare: Provides convenient features for house-call physicians, including progress management, route navigation, secure photo capture, electronic access authentication, and comprehensive charting modules specifically designed for tablet interfaces.
3. Data Analysis: Capable of identifying, analyzing, and reporting on key data related to logistics, utilization patterns, and patient billing costs. Selected reports may include organizational charts, advanced patient demographic information, and geographic location data.
4. Integrated Electronic Health Records (EHR): Comprehensively integrates a read-write consolidation model, enabling access to existing EHR systems, including those from Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts.
5. Payment Model: Integrates multiple payment functions, enabling direct payment via the patient’s credit card or accounts such as HRA/HSA.
6. Telemedicine: The Medicast platform can be integrated into existing telemedicine service systems to provide seamlessly connected care solutions.
7. White-label Model: The company can integrate Medicast services and apply its own brand label, thereby promoting its brand while serving patients.
8. Modularity: Companies can utilize only the modules they need and integrate them with their internal clinical, financial operations, and telemedicine systems.
9. Streamlined Workflow: Customize the entire workflow to simplify care delivery, ensuring clinicians access only the data and tools they truly need.

Medicast Pricing
Medicast charges a minimum fee of $200 (approximately RMB 1,240) per consultation. An additional surcharge of $100 applies for visits during nighttime hours (8:00 PM to 8:00 AM) and on weekends. This pricing is significantly lower than the cost of an emergency room visit in the United States. The majority of the consultation fee goes directly to the physician, with Medicast retaining only a small commission. Additionally, Medicast provides professional malpractice insurance for its doctors. This model has proven highly attractive to physicians, particularly part-time practitioners seeking supplemental income, young doctors needing capital to launch their practices, and experienced physicians desiring greater control over their schedules.
Meanwhile, Medicast also offers membership services. For a monthly fee of $39, members receive two home visits per year with no additional charges. For a monthly fee of $75, members receive four home visits per year, are exempt from overtime fees, and enjoy additional childcare services for children under 18 years of age.

Medicast Financing Details
On November 8, 2013, Medicast raised $540,000 in seed funding from 12 investors, including Berninger Verwaltungs GmbH, Tucker Max, Dharmesh Shah, Eric Ries, Pharmacast, Adam Kunz, Dion DeLoof, Pascal Levy-Garboua, Chris Harris, Techstars, Sprint Nextel, and Kima Ventures.
On May 20, 2014, Medicast raised an additional $1.4 million in seed funding.

Founder of Medicast

The professional backgrounds of the three founders are equally impressive and commendable: each has held positions at multiple globally renowned enterprises, accumulating extensive and valuable work experience. This expertise is, of course, inextricably linked to Medicast’s success.



1. Sam Zebarji, CEO



An expert with 15 years of experience in the mobile, consumer, enterprise technology, and wireless industries. During his tenure at Nokia, he designed and deployed large-scale services for more than 25 wireless carriers across over 20 countries worldwide in less than a year. Previously, he played a key role in technical and business planning during the $36 billion merger of Sprint and Nextel. He has led innovation, sales, and marketing initiatives at Fortune 1000 companies, while also overseeing portfolio management and business expansion into new sectors. He has been interviewed by multiple media outlets, including CNN Headline News and USA Today, serves as an advisor to early-stage high-growth startups, is a contributor to Entrepreneur magazine, and acts as a mentor for 500 Startups and The Iron Yard.

2. NAFIS ZEBARJADI, Chief Product Officer


Nafis is a technology evangelist with 15 years of experience as a hacker in the high-tech industry. His previous products mainly included heavy-user systems and mobile, social, and consumer-oriented products, particularly those with large-scale backend systems.
Nafis began his career during the dot-com era, designing cloud-based infrastructure for offline data storage and retrieval. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he led a team dedicated to developing web semantics-based solutions for medical bioinformatics and public health, while coordinating standardization efforts, including Section 508 compliance and user interface design for distributed healthcare information systems. During his tenure at Nokia, he rearchitected the provisioning backend services used by nearly one billion mobile devices. In his most recent role at Google, he served as a technical advisor to 25 key partners, collectively driving billions of dollars in annual advertising revenue. He also acted as a Google product expert and technical mentor for startups.

3. Dr. Sahba Ferdowsi, Chief Medical Officer





(Editor: Zhang Nan)

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