The emergency room — often the first stop for parents when their children are sick — can be more than an hour away for residents in rural Texas. Additionally, these emergency rooms often aren’t staffed with pediatric providers.
UT alumni Kevin Pearce and Brian White, who both graduated from the McCombs School of Business in 2004, founded Urgent Care for Kids in 2011 to solve these problems and plan to expand their business this year.
“So here you are. You’ve got a kid, your most prized possession, who is sick,” Pearce said. “You don’t know why, but you have no real pediatric resources with which to use to make them better. We saw this missing void and said, ‘We could do this better.’”
Urgent Care for Kids is currently adding to their pediatric clinics across Texas and improving their virtual platform, Pearce said.
“Our whole role was to make a customer-focused, pediatric-specialized program that would help these children and families at the time when it mattered most to them,” Pearce said. “As a part of that, we felt there were opportunities in the virtual care space to send the top-notch pediatric care in our clinics to the state of Texas.”
Last July, Urgent Care for Kids started offering a service called Virtual Care for Kids, which allows a parent to video chat with a pediatrician,
Pearce said.
Management senior Thalia Perez said this service makes health care more accessible to people who can’t take off work to take their children to
a pediatrician.
“People are really busy nowadays in our fast-paced environment, so it’s really hard to get to the doctor or make an appointment,” Perez said.
Urgent Care for Kids is partnering with El Paso Independent School District through its virtual platform and will have the largest in-school telemedicine partnership in the nation, Pearce said.
“(We) have the opportunity not only to build a neat business, but we have the opportunity to deliver a service to families in Texas, and hopefully throughout the nation, that is really impactful in their lives and their children’s health,” Pearce said.
Finance junior Neha Grover said the atmosphere in the business school makes students want to improve themselves and benefit their communities.
“I think (Urgent Care for Kids) is really awesome, and we have great grads that work really hard,” Grover said. “All our professors really motivate (us) to be what’s going to change the world.”
