Why HeroHouse was born
Nine years in pediatrics, five in the pediatric ICU, and a lot of 11 PM phone calls from worried parents later — here’s the short story of how HeroHouse came to be.
The easiest way to understand HeroHouse is to know the moment it started feeling inevitable.
I was a few years into my career as a pediatric nurse practitioner — I’d spent most of the preceding years in pediatric intensive care, which is where you learn pretty quickly that the hardest part of pediatrics is almost never the medicine. It’s the uncertainty. It’s the parents standing in a hallway trying to figure out whether the thing their kid has is the kind of thing you worry about or the kind of thing that passes in two days. It’s the decision they’re making at 10 PM about whether to load the kid in the car or sleep on it.
Over and over, I’d see families land in an ER waiting room at 11 PM for something that didn’t need an ER. I’d see parents sit for two hours in urgent care just to be told “looks viral, push fluids, see your pediatrician tomorrow.” And I’d see parents who had something serious going on and didn’t know it — because nobody had taken the time to actually look.
Every one of those parents had the same need: a pediatric clinician with the time and judgment to tell them the truth about what was going on. And almost none of them had a way to get that.
What was missing
The gap was obvious once you saw it.
- Their pediatrician’s office was closed or a week out for an appointment.
- Urgent care and the ER are built for physical emergencies — not “is this something?” questions.
- Generic telehealth platforms would route them to whichever random clinician was available — someone who didn’t know the kid, wasn’t a pediatric specialist, and had about seven minutes to spend before moving to the next call.
What was missing was something in the middle. Pediatric-specific, unrushed, led by a clinician who actually knew the family. Available when the rest of the system wasn’t.
Why “clinician-owned” matters
Most telehealth is owned by venture-backed companies whose incentives are to maximize throughput — more visits per hour, more prescriptions per visit, more clinicians rotating in and out. It’s why generic telehealth feels like a transaction.
HeroHouse is owned by me. Which means the incentives are simple: do right by the kids, or I don’t have a practice. Every visit is me. Every message is me. If your daughter had a weird rash in June and it comes back in October, I’ll remember. If your son’s ADHD meds needed dose adjustments last spring, I’ll know the history.
That continuity is what good pediatric care has always been — and it’s almost impossible to get in the current system unless you luck into a small-practice pediatrician with an open panel.
The triage-first promise
The other thing I kept seeing was families being charged for visits that shouldn’t have been visits — telehealth calls that should have been redirected to urgent care or the ER from the jump. That’s a broken incentive structure, and I didn’t want HeroHouse to repeat it.
So every concern at HeroHouse starts with triage. Before I schedule or charge for a visit, I screen to make sure telehealth is actually appropriate. If your child needs hands-on care, an x-ray, or the ER, I’ll say so — and you’ll never pay me for a visit that couldn’t help.
What’s next
We’re starting with Indiana, starting with general pediatric telehealth and pediatric behavioral health for ages 6–17, and we’ll grow from there. There’s a lot I want to build — more services, more writing, eventually monthly live Q&A sessions for parents — but all of it rests on the same foundation: the same clinician, every visit, with the time your family deserves.
If that’s what you’ve been looking for, I hope HeroHouse is it.
— Jesse
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