Terence M Chang MD PLLC
Family Medicine | Sports Medicine | House Calls
Hi. I'm Terence.
I began making house calls in Houston in January 2014. For me, the idea started when I was seeing athletes in the training room while serving as a college team physician. We also did house calls for our elderly patients during residency but I wondered if it was possible to bring house calls to a broader population. Why did doctors even stop doing house calls?
A Simple Idea
I had friends whose schedules were too overwhelming to squeeze in a sick visit. A few of them were unemployed and uninsured, so I started seeing them at their homes after I got off of work. What started as a simple idea soon grew into this part-time, solo, house call micropractice in Houston.
And then... the COVID-19 pandemic happened in Houston in March 2020. With an unknown contagious disease, no protective equipment, no testing supplies, and no treatment options, I stopped doing house calls. Frankly, the urgent care I work at was so overwhelmed and over-run with cases that I had no bandwidth to do house calls. Those early days were very scary, but over time after a lot of learning, sharing, working together, masking, and vaccinating, we've been able to make a dent in this pandemic. As medicines become available, I've been able to pivot my focus towards treating COVID19 at people's homes.
Experience
I've been seeing COVID-19 patients from the beginning.
I'm a board-certified, fellowship-trained sports medicine physician and general family physician. I currently work full-time as an urgent care physician at Next Level Urgent Care and provide medical house calls on my days off as an independent solo practice.
Prior to urgent care, I taught residents as a faculty attending physician at Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program, and I taught medical students from UTMB and Texas A&M as a clinical assistant professor. I designed our sports medicine curriculum and mentored future primary care physicians. I supervised 42 family medicine residents in the hospital for both pediatrics and adult medicine and in the clinic at Memorial Hermann's Physicians at Sugar Creek in Sugar Land, Texas.
We started a clinical research division at Next Level Urgent Care at the start of the pandemic with the aim to advance medical science for novel COVID-19 therapeutics. I was the principal investigator for a few of these COVID-19 clinical trials, and our work on monoclonal antibodies contributed to its emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA. Over the course of the pandemic, not only did we accumulate a great amount of experience taking care of COVID-19 patients in the outpatient setting, we also developed a high level of comfort working with these IV medications used to treat this disease.
It makes sense to provide this kind of treatment in patients' home and hotel rooms because it allows patients to remain in quarantine, without risking further spread of COVID-19, at a time when people aren't feeling well at all.
Education & Training
I grew up in Houston and am a proud graduate of Alief Hastings High School (Go Bears!). After graduating with my bachelor's degree cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, I earned my MD from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 2005 where I was a recipient of the Lefeber Prize.
I trained at Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program at Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital in Houston, Texas where I served as Chief Resident in 2008 and won the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine's Resident Teaching Award and the Sports Medicine Resident Award. I then completed my training at Bayfront Sports Medicine Fellowship Program in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2009 before returning to academia to teach family medicine and sports medicine.
I'm a Diplomate of the American Board of Family Medicine with a Certificate of Added Qualifications in Sports Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Today, I spend my time doing house calls and working at the urgent care. I really feel lucky and honored to be invited into people's homes to help when they are sick. Contact me if you need a house call.