A startup promised to make health care ‘refreshingly simple.’ Building the business has been anything but
SAN FRANCISCO — The first thing you see when you enter Lemonaid Health’s offices is a dazzling bright yellow accent wall. Doctors work at desks clustered together in an open-plan office, ducking into smaller offices to conduct video visits with patients.
The engineering, design, and data science teams sit just steps away. Hanging from a standing coat rack is a king’s crown, like the kind found in a child’s dress-up drawer, that employees wear proudly on their work anniversary.
The space, in other words, has the look and feel of an up-and-coming tech startup — and that’s by design.
Lemonaid is part of a new wave that allow patients to skip the traditional office visit and instead chat online with a doctor to get birth control or prescription drugs to treat simple conditions, like urinary tract infections and erectile dysfunction. The idea is to rethink the way health care works, at least in some respects.
