Dr. Akash Mehta is an Emergency Medicine board-certified specialist, health and fitness consultant, and Concierge Medicine physician based out of Los Angeles. Dr. Mehta first studied at the Honors College at the University of Florida where he obtained a Bachelor of Science. Afterward, he began working as a microbiologist for a year. He decided to change careers and then entered the Touro College of Medicine in Manhattan. After finishing medical school, Dr. Mehta completed his Emergency Medicine residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. Then Dr. Mehta joined Kaiser Permanente as an Emergency Medicine attending physician in West Los Angeles. After some years of obtaining intricate knowledge of the healthcare system by working for such a conglomerate, he decided to branch on his own and create Nyla Health. He continues to work with various Emergency Medicine groups in and around Los Angeles, and most notably had extensive experience in the frontline during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Learn more about emergency medicine expert Dr. Akash Mehta in this introductory Q & A.

My greatest achievement:

Saving a life. Any athletic, personal, or professional achievements cannot compare. Getting the title of “associate professor” with a medical school is a dream. Getting that 4th-degree black belt wasn’t easy. And I’m so proud to be raising two healthy and amazing children. But what good is my time here if I didn’t use it to better the world? And in the realm of Emergency Medicine, we can be privileged with the opportunity to have someone literally at “death’s door” come into our services and have them awake and walking soon after. My greatest joy comes from hugging such patients and their families.

What is the future of your field?

Hospital-based Emergency Departments (EDs) will only become busier and more crowded as the population increases and ages (Most healthcare services are used by the elderly). Renovating to larger EDs and creating new hospitals is in fact not benefiting patients, as they are not keeping up to pace with this change. Thus, you will lessen your chances that an Emergency Medicine board-certified physician will be taking care of you, as hospitals or private ED medical groups will have to hire more physicians from general fields who only have some “experience” in EDs. This is why I created Nyla Health.

I am providing experienced “frontline care” with members at home, where I can spend extensive time with my patients, and help prevent any hospitalization or “big hospital ED” visit to the best of my ability by combining my extensive knowledge of medicine, health, nutrition, and fitness. And soon I will be bringing this care to a private concierge Emergency Department setting.

The biggest misconception about my field is…

This may be for medicine in general, but it may be a distrust of our intentions. ED bills can run high if you compare them to an office visit with a primary care physician. And patients falsely believe that we as physicians are collecting the large bill. Some patients also believe that we will order unnecessary diagnostic tests or perform unnecessary procedures to line our pockets. Truth is, we get only a very small percentage of what a patient pays, and we are rarely in need of patients, so it would be hurtful to our workflow (and against our ethical code) to order or perform extraneously.

Compared to a physician in an office, you are paying to be seen emergently, with direct access into a hospital if needed, and with emergent testing and tools unavailable elsewhere; thus to start off, your insurance will dictate that as a higher bill. Then, most of your payout will go to the insurance and pharmaceutical company for any medicines you obtained. Then the hospital will get some money, and the least will go to the physician’s practice for whom they work (often is a large national corporation or a group of senior partnered doctors), and a small cut of that will actually be paid to the physician who treated you.

What are you best known for?

I believe I’m best known for my intelligence, hands-on procedural skills, and bedside manner. Nearly every review or testimonial I’ve gotten focuses on my knowledge first and foremost. I take pride in having been a good student in 12+ years of education and training after high school, and continuing to stay up-to-date (and involved) with the latest medical research in my off-time. Procedurally, I don’t believe there is a procedure or surgical skill in my field that I am deficient at (I credit that to my amazing training in Miami), and have often been asked by my colleagues a decade or two my senior to help them with procedures such as placing a breathing tube (intubation), a tube to drain the blood from a lung (chest tube), etc. And last but not least, if there’s anything I learned in the real world, is that I can be the most intelligent of providers, but patients will not like you if you cannot be cordial and cannot explain everything well and in a way they can understand.

What is your most memorable patient reaction?

Probably having a mother pull me in for a hug just after I just delivered her newborn in the passenger seat of a car. She was from another country, had no obstetrician in the U.S. I was working as the “triage” physician that night in the ED. What that means is that I am the first provider you see in the ED, and I sort of allocate where patients go based on how sick they are. It was slow for an hour, so I strolled to the back and was chatting with a colleague with my coffee around 2 a.m. All of a sudden I hear “Dr. Mehta needed to front parking lot stat” on the speakers. So I started walking fast and a nurse says, “I think someone is going to deliver!” I rip off my white coat, grab some gloves, run, and there is a mother in child-birth position in the passenger seat of a car in front of the ED doors! All with the car door open and one of my technicians standing in front getting ready to catch in case I didn’t come fast enough. And then I saw part of the infant’s scalp and hair and knew I had to deliver right then and there instead of having time to whisk her to the Labor & Delivery unit. I had no gown and thus, my exposed arms, my scrubs, and my gloves became covered in amniotic fluid. Luckily, the child was healthy! I placed the child into the mother’s arms, cut the cord (no resources in this scenario to have the father calmly cut the cord for family pictures) and as soon as I did so, she pulled me in crying in happiness for a hug with her and her daughter all while we were both soiled in bodily fluids. Quite an experience I’ll never forget!

What sets my practice apart?

Receiving medical care shouldn’t be a difficult, convoluted path that you have to navigate alone. Nyla Health gives you a “first-class” feel in medicine. I, or a team member, would be your first point of contact when you need help, and we would be with you even if your care had to be passed onto our exclusive network of specialists or into a hospital. You get the advantage of a board-certified Emergency Medicine specialist such as myself at your fingertips simply with a call or text. And soon, we will have concierge Emergency Departments for members, with extensive attention and care at the bedside and without crowding and excessive noise.

What I love most about my profession:

I love the variability and the ability to immediately impact patients. I will often go from one room where someone may be having a heart attack to another room where a mother is having some vaginal bleeding in pregnancy and then to a room where someone is dying from a drug overdose. And in most of these cases, I can change their lives with prompt use of my knowledge and experience.