Posted on Instagram and “liked” by nearly 65,000 people, a photo of celebrity supermodel Chrissy Teigen has a simple caption: “hello body meet vitamins.”

Teigen sits in a bed, dressed in a robe, with an intravenous line (IV) in one arm while reaching for a cup of tea with her other arm.

Was she sick? Maybe. Or maybe she was just receiving IV vitamin therapy, a procedure that has been popularized by celebrities and athletes. Clinics offering the therapy are popping up everywhere, and now there’s at least one in the Spring Branch District.

NeuMed Modern Urgent Care + IV Therapy opened in December at 1406 Wirt Road at the northeast corner of Wirt and Westview.

The clinic, owned by Dr. Akash Bhagat and family nurse practitioner Victoria Bhagat, is one of four locations in the Houston area for NeuMed, with a fifth opening this summer in Montrose.

Chief Operations Officer Adam Yera said the clinic offers urgent care services; STD/STI testing; sports physicals; testing for COVID, flu and strep; treatment of cuts, lacerations and light fractures; x-rays; health screening laboratory tests and more.

“Our patients for urgent care come in all kinds of ranges but the majority would be young families with or without small children, and even elderly patients, that don’t want to wait for availability with their primary care doctors — as we can treat a lot of the same things that a primary care doctor would treat,” Yera said.

“We are one of the only urgent care clinics with an on-staff x-ray every day of the week, so we treat a lot of patients who need x-rays.”

A huge part of the business outside of urgent care, Yera said, is IV vitamin therapy infusions, vitamin shots/boosters, hormone therapy and — coming soon — ketamine therapy.

“The most common reasons that our patients come to us for IV vitamin therapy is that they’re feeling sick or starting to feel sick, and they need to feel better fast, so they come in for a Neu-Immunity Infusion that is packed full of vitamins and Vitamin C or a Neu-Start Infusion if it’s more of a nausea feeling,” Yera said.

“The other majority of people are high-performing people (and) or athletes who want to be at the top of their game and position their body to perform at its best with vitamins and hydration.”

Several mobile IV services, urgent care clinics and “drip spas” do business in the Houston area. But, Yera said, NeuMed is the first and only combined urgent care and IV therapy clinic here.

“We offer both as a means to provide urgent care patients IV infusion therapy at IV therapy prices versus urgent care prices,” he said. “Also, as an urgent care provider, we offer the ability to provide prescription medication intravenously, something that most other IV clinics cannot do.”

NeuMed also offers the type of service a celebrity would appreciate — private infusion suites. “Other clinics put you in one big room with chairs while you’re receiving your infusion,” Yera said.

“Our goal is to change the way people think about getting immediate care,” Yera added. The clinic is modern and elegantly designed, he said, and also provides transparent, affordable pricing.

While most major insurance plans are accepted for urgent care, NeuMed offers memberships starting at $59 a month for self-pay patients. IV therapy membership plans start at $39 a month.

“We’ve also made providing a stellar customer experience a fundamental pillar of our business model,” Yera said. “We’ve taken the most common pain points associated with urgent care and completely addressed them from day one.”

Why Spring Branch? Yera said the owners love the community and are very confident in its growth and future potential.

“We want to be a part of that growth,” he said.

NeuMed Modern Urgent Care + IV Therapy
1406 Wirt Rd. Houston, TX 77055
(832) 203-5912
https://neumed.com/

— by Dorothy Puch Lillig