Moving to a new country isn’t easy. Throw in an unfamiliar city, a new language, and different customs to make it even more challenging. And then what happens if you get sick? Questions begin racing through your mind: How do I find a doctor? Will I have to speak to my healthcare provider in English? Can I afford it? Navigating the U.S. healthcare system is difficult for individuals who have spent their entire lives in the country, and for those who are brand new, it can seem like an insurmountable task. 

Dewi Kreckman knows the feeling all too well. She arrived in the United States from Indonesia around two years ago, right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon after she settled into her new home in Michigan, she became ill. The illness was rough, causing her to be sick for a couple of weeks as she began to think about what care was even available, and accessible, for someone like her.

“I was sick for about two weeks,” she said. “I couldn't get out of bed, and I should have gone to a clinic or been hospitalized, but the first thing that came to my mind was how expensive it would be to be hospitalized. I don’t drive, and at the time, my English was crappy. But I’m lucky because my husband is a [physician assistant-certified], so he could give me medicine and everything, but I was thinking, ‘What will happen to others?’”

Those thoughts changed Kreckman’s future. Soon after, she and her husband Eric Kreckman, PA-C, began building a telemedicine platform specifically for immigrants and named it Decuremed. 

At the beginning stages, Kreckman worked her own community network of immigrants who were sick and scared, many without insurance. To help them, she gave out her husband's number and the calls started to come in. There was obviously a demand, and she soon learned that current telehealth solutions aren’t meeting the needs of the immigrant community.

In the last decade in the U.S., patients’ and caregivers’ use of telemedicine has drastically increased. According to the American Hospital Association, around three-quarters of hospitals use some kind of telemedicine services. Allowing patients to access care where they are can save time, money, and energy—no more commuting to a crowded waiting room to see a doctor when you’re not feeling well. And telemedicine can also allow physicians to see more patients. 

With the COVID pandemic, use of telehealth services increased 80 percent in some areas hit hard by the early waves of the pandemic, according to a survey done by the Department of Health and Human Services. However, the survey found that video-enabled telehealth, which can offer multiple benefits over audio-only telehealth, has big disparities in the demographic groups of individuals using the service. Users of video-enabled telehealth are typically young, white, and affluent with private insurance, while the uninsured are much less likely to use these services.

While telehealth looks to enter the mainstream, there are still a lot of barriers to overcome both on the patient and the provider side, including compliance with local laws, insurance and Medicare coverage, and patients’ access to a reliable internet connection. Telehealth services can also be difficult for those who have low digital literacy or who have issues with reading or speaking the language of their provider or telehealth service, a big problem for the immigrant community. 

“I am coming from my own experience. I tried using online doctors who are now our competitors, and I was disappointed,” Dewi Kreckman said, adding that she once waited 40 minutes on a blank screen on one platform before hanging up and later was charged $80 even though she never spoke to a provider. She finally got on another platform and got a virtual face-to-face with a doctor but the language barrier was too much. 

“I was struggling because he was speaking so fast,” she recalled. “With my business approach, I believe that everything online is the future. With all of this experience with online healthcare, I started thinking, ‘Hey, maybe we create something that is more suitable and user-friendly for immigrant users.’”

Decuremed is in its early stages. Right now, users are able to make an appointment through their website with Eric Krekman–who offers his services in English, Indonesian, and Filipino–as the team aims to onboard more healthcare providers in the future. They’re also working on developing an app.

“You can get access to your medical records, right now, 24-7. You get a review of your last visit in case you want to take that to your primary care provider,” Eric Kreckman explained of what the Decuremed service currently offers. “You can also request appointments and you have the ability to text a provider. So, if you need to do a follow-up to say, ‘This worked, I’m feeling better,’ or, ‘This isn’t working, I still have this problem.’ it isn’t just that you have to come back again and pay another $80.” 

Dewi Kreckman, who started her entrepreneurial journey as a broke college student in Indonesia but has earned international recognition for her work as an entrepreneur throughout the past few years, is working to develop Decuremed into a scalable platform. She’s also leveraging her community of fellow immigrants, many of which make up her robust social media following, to make sure their telemedicine needs are being addressed. 

The telehealth industry seems to be on the rise, even giants Amazon and Walmart are planning entry into the space. But Decuremed’s targeted audience of immigrants helps them stand out from current offerings. The startup is part of a larger goal of Kreckmans’ to give back to her community and help others facing the same challenges she faced when arriving in a new country.

“From my personal experience as a legal immigrant, for the first 6 months, it was illegal for me to work,” Dewi Kreckman said. “When I started to work, I was doing something very simple. I worked at Kroger. I had someone ask me where I was from because of my accent, and he then told me that I was stealing American jobs… I felt very sad and unwanted. 

“I tried not to talk about it, but then I felt like I needed to help other immigrants to open new opportunities for themselves here. I thought maybe if I created a business to help immigrants, I could create jobs for them, too.”

By: Erin Shea

Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.