$2,000 health care app promises to be the Uber in its field

A new tech start-up wants to be the Uber of health care.

Concierge Key Health is building an app that would let consumers schedule access, on-demand, to general practitioners and top-tier physicians in specialized fields such as orthopedics, cardiology and brain surgery.

When the app launches in the fall, patients in a dozen cities—including New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami and Washington, D.C.—will have the ability to book appointments from a pool of 1,500 specialists for urgent care and hospital concierge clinics.

"We want to create an Uber-like service nationwide," says Concierge Key Health CEO Robert Grant, an entrepreneur who has extensive experience in the medical field. "One of the biggest challenges in health care is no one thinks of the patient experience—and yet we pay as much for health care as anything else."

"We're not trying to provide health services, but timely access to top-flight specialists," he says.

Advances in on-demand technology have made it possible for the Newport Beach, Calif-based start-up to offer consumers a more pleasant trip to the doctor, says Grant, whose company landed funding from the Dental Innovations in Germany and private investors. The concierge service costs $2,000 annually for an individual, and $3,500 for a family.

If all goes well, the service will be expanded to 25 cities by the end of 2018 and available in some international markets in 2019, Grant says.

"We have re-imagined the user experience, soup to nuts," says Grant, vice chairman of Alphaeon, a subsidiary of Strathspey Crown Holdings, in the lifestyle health care market. "There's no reason you should have to wait up to weeks to see a specialist."