Who We Are

I arrived in Australia as a child refugee, having passed through six countries before my family found somewhere to stay.

I grew up watching people I loved try to navigate systems that weren’t built with them in mind — healthcare, disability support, aged care — always one step behind, always translating, always uncertain whether they were getting the full picture or just what they’d been told. I mean “translating” literally as often as I mean it figuratively. I grew up speaking more than one language at home, and I was often the one standing between my family and a system that assumed everyone spoke its language, medical and otherwise.

I’ve lived the cost of that gap directly. I’ve cared for family members who travelled overseas for months at a time — the cost, the visas, the disruption to work and life — just to sit in front of one specialist. It worked, because we had the means and the persistence to make it happen.

Most of the world doesn’t have that. For many, no amount of money changes it; no visa they can obtain, no passport that opens the doors others take for granted. And the gap isn’t only about developing countries or difficult borders; it shows up just as easily for someone in a well-resourced healthcare system stuck on a six-month waitlist, or lost in a referral process that was never built with urgency in mind.

Over the years, as I moved into a career in healthcare governance and digital health, I became the person friends, family and community members turned to whenever they received a serious diagnosis. Not because I was a health professional, but because I understood how to find clarity in systems that often withhold it. The questions were always the same:

Is this the right diagnosis?

Are there other options?

Should I be looking elsewhere?

Most of the time, the honest answer was: I don’t know, but I know who might.

I’d already spent a 25-year career in healthcare, designing and delivering services nationally and internationally; including shaping the clinical governance behind one of Australia’s earliest end-to-end telehealth models. I knew, long before it was fashionable, that distance didn’t have to mean disconnection, that the right expertise could reach someone regardless of where they were sitting.

That’s what Med Mend is: independent second medical opinions from credentialed specialists, delivered as a written report, a video consultation, or both.

Delivering that opinion — properly, safely, with real governance behind it — costs something. Med Mend exists so that access to a specialist’s opinion no longer depends on where you live, what your healthcare system allows, what your passport can get you, or what’s within your means.

None of that turns into a real service without the people who chose to build it with me.

Basim Alansari