Dr. Nadia Nabavi, MD, an Atlanta-based double board-certified emergency physician, knows just how broken the emergency healthcare system is in the United States.
“No matter where you are, whether it’s Washington State or Washington DC, America doesn’t have a way of managing unscheduled care,” she told Hypepotamus. “If you have an appointment, we’ve got doctors for everything. But when you don’t have an appointment, you’re sort of left to figure out stuff on your own. So you’re either Googling your symptoms, you’re calling your mom, or you’re going to urgent care or the emergency department.”
But that creates the problem of overcrowded ERs….often with patients who could have been treated at home.
It was a problem she saw over and over again while working as the Associate EMS Medical Director at Atlanta’s Grady Health System from 2018 to 2023. She saw first-hand how emergency rooms were stretched thin as people came in for non-emergency needs.
So she launched Green Dot Health (GDH) to “democratize access to ER doctors” right from home.
Inside Green Dot Health
The 24/7 virtual medical support platform, which launched at the end of 2024, is designed to help mitigate unnecessary ER visits by providing people with quality telehealth care. But unlike other virtual healthcare platforms, Green Dot manages the entire non-emergency care journey instead of providing a one-time service.
“Not everybody needs the emergency department, but everybody absolutely needs the expertise of the emergency physician,” Nabavi added. “If you’re having an emergency, we’ll direct you to the right emergency department. But we can manage the entire non-emergency episode as an outpatient.”
This includes providing care for fevers, nausea, flank pain, rashes, and other common conditions that bring people into ERs. Patients connect to a doctor within five minutes of reaching out.
In its early stages, Green Dot has recorded an 85% emergency department avoidance rate. That means fewer people are having to spend precious time in a waiting room to get the care they need.
The startup sees the platform has an opportunity to help decrease stress on overworked ER staff and worried patients.
“The bigger story for me is the human capital,” Nabavi told Hypepotamus. “It’s the hundreds of hours spent just waiting to be seen. We need to take ER doctors out of hospital systems and make them available to all patients.”
From ER Doctor To Entrepreneur
A child of immigrants, Nabavi was drawn to medicine from an early age, despite having frequent trips to the ER.
“I loved the care that I received there, and the people that took care of me,” she said. Nabavi added she wants to provide that same level of care and “peace of mind” to her own patients now.
Nabavi is a graduate of Georgia State University and the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. She spent her residency and fellowship years at Emory University School of Medicine. While working in the ER during COVID, she saw that the healthcare community “needed to do something different” when it came to treating patients.
“The writing was on the wall,” she said. Her parent company at the time approached her about starting a virtual emergency services program. The program scaled to working with patients across 20 states before ultimately getting shut down in December 2023. Released from the job without a non-compete, Nabavi started working on Green Dot to ensure that the important virtual healthcare work did not stop.
The Green Dot Business
Nabavi said the original plan was to build an “AAA for healthcare,” where users paid for care as they went. But she realized that model, which billed patients after each interaction, was not patient friendly.
Now with a monthly subscription of $129 per month, users can reach out to physicians on the platform an unlimited number of times with questions or concerns. She added that Green Dot saves the average user $3,500 per interaction when they are able to triage issues without going to a physical ER.
The startup currently has four physicians and support staff on the team available to patients.
Building Tech For Patients
While relatively new to the startup world, Nabavi has wasted no time leaning into local resources. She joined Atlanta Tech Village’s It Takes a Village and Goodie Nation’s NextGEN cohort, accelerators designed to help early-stage founders.
Nabavi said that even a few years ago it would have been difficult to start a business like Green Dot. But she credits agentic AI tools and her new-found love of “vibe coding” for giving her the ability to connect disjointed tech stacks and ultimately create a more seamless tech experience.
“At the end of the day, if we’re going to institute behavior change, we have to fit into behavior workflows,” she said about the experience of building the early version of Green Dot. “If you are sick or injured, you’re most likely going to pick up your phone and Google your symptoms or you’re going to call someone that you trust. We realize that our patients aren’t going to pick up a phone and log into a portal. We have to be as easy to access as just picking up a phone and texting or calling.”
But just as importantly, the physician’s backend has to be sophisticated enough to track patients and their health journeys while using the platform.
Direct-To-Patient Care
Green Dot is one of a few healthcare startups in the Southeast bringing a direct-to-consumer care model to more people. Others Hypepotamus has covered recently include Veo Health (a health optimization platform), CareYaya (senior care on demand), Corra Health (AI-powered health assistant), and Embody (privacy-focused hormonal health tracker).
Bootstrapped to date, Green Dot boasts a 75% utilization rate. The startup has also recorded 50% month-over-month growth, according to Nabavi.
While growing its direct-to-consumer model, Green Dot is also looking at pilot programs with senior living communities and employer groups.
“My future vision for Green Dot health is for every American and every person to have access to an emergency physician to help during these moments of uncertainty, illness and pain,” Nabavi added.