 Marcia Joiner and we are navigating the journey and today's journey is not very far away. In fact it's in Waikiki and we are going to meet the doctors of Waikiki. Now of course you know that we only do dear friends and my goodness this is a dear friend. We're going to meet Dr. Alan Wu. Now I have to tell you how I met Dr. Wu. It was a December day and I was in such pain with my knees needed to be taken care of and like a real junkie you know oh I've got to have a shot I've got to have a shot. So I called Trippler first thing Monday morning and I asked the nurse that answered the phone if I could have a doctor to give me a shot of cortisone and then he says oh well there are no doctors here and I said no no no no no no everybody at Trippler can do this everybody knows how to give a shot so he says well we have a brand new doctor just arrived and he came from Afghanistan. I said I want him he knows how to put people back together I want him I want him today so I got to be his very first patient after he came back from Afghanistan and I will not let go. He is now a civilian in his own business in the doctors of Waikiki so I want you to meet the best doctor in the whole world and if you repeat it you say Marsha told you so. So Dr. Allen Wu I am so pleased to see you. Thank you my dear thank you for this wonderful introduction how are you doing today? Oh I'm fine you know we just talked about you being in the military and how long were you in the military because of course when I met you you were at winding down your career in the military you got an award if I remember correctly. You had what twelve seven thousand patients or something like that seven thousand patients in Afghanistan and never lost one is that correct? That's correct ma'am. That's correct you see I told you he was the best in the world and if he could put that many people back together and not lose one then I hold on to him. So tell us about your career in the military. So ma'am I did serve 15 years five years four years in the reserve and 11 as an active duty doctor I trained at Walter Reed in DC where I was a internal medicine physician I also did hospital work and I got deployed multiple times and when I first met Ms. Joyner was back in December of 2011 when I got back from my tour in Afghanistan after 12 months being there. There I was one of the doctors on the front line on a farm out in northwest of Afghanistan right at the Pakistan border close to the Pakistan and Afghanistan Himalaya border and there was a very hot zone what we called it I actually came as an emergency replacement for a doctor who got injured while six hours boots on ground that's how hostile the that we went to was and I was at that time the battalion surgeon for the 10th Mountain Division so we were there for about a year and fortunately I did see about 7,000 patients we did not pronounce anybody at when they reached my hand so I have to say I haven't lost anybody while I touched them but there are definitely other soldiers that lost their life during that conflict oh I'm sure that I am sure they did not arrive to my area but we were at the first line docs usually after me my job was to stabilize them and ship them out to Baghrum where we had our bigger hospital bigger echelon of care and there they would do the best to revitalize them we saw a lot of patients and we did a lot of good deed and we're trying to win the hearts in mind of the Afghani national at that time also so we took care of a lot of Afghani personnel that have privileges on our base and our fob was heavily attacked we got attacked daily there was mortar rounds that were inbound so you could imagine the hostile environment that we lived in for about a year but that also made us a little bit better about handling stressful situation like the current pandemic that we're in again I feel like we're thrust into the front line here again and then we're trying to take care of now not just the soldiers but but our entire ohana our kaila and us everybody who lives in Hawaii and who call Hawaii home and we're very proud of that I'm a local boy I'm very happy to be part of this and you know after I met you I got to go on to even better assignments you know being yes you did you left me yes I was a chief of flight surgery I got selected from flight surgery school so I went and became a flight surgeon and did special ops for about four years before I finally got out of the military and say hey this is enough abuse on my body and I can't do I can't jump off a UH-60 with 400 pounds on my body yeah so well now I have to tell you my one little story here I was in such pain and my knees needed to be replaced and he said that he was going to give me the million-dollar shot so triplets are training hospital so he gathers all of these people to show them this million-dollar shot and so you know he does and one of one of the corpsman there said why is it a million-dollar shot and you said and I quote you know all those football players those million-dollar football players well this is what they do to them when they get injured they take them off the field give them the shot and put them back in and so so even today when I call your office and I say this is Marsha Joyner he said you want your million-dollar shot so not there definitely yes so I don't know what's in it some kind of formula I have no idea except that that's been the go to whatever that is yeah we're always trained in different fields especially in the military so I'm fortunate enough to train out while to read in DC where we have orthopedic sports medicine and rheumatology so you are able to adapt and absorb all the different skills set from a large huge training facility in DC like this and there you learn based on what we call evidence-based medicine what is the best formula that you do a population study which mixture of medication to use to give you the best results was the most minimal side effects and that's why it's think about it now it's almost 10 years I think you're your knees are still good they're fabulous yes you are in the um Princess Kailani hotel which is a beautiful place and you have how many staff that speak how many languages um our staff we have to total of 35 staff um they're all versatile in multiple languages we have one of our front desk girl that is fluent in Korean Mandarin Japanese and English wow she's she's Japanese uh by heritage but she worked in Korea for eight years uh and then she married a gentleman from Beijing China where she learned her Mandarin and then she also is very uh well equipped in writing in Arabic so we have very talented people that's just one that's just one of my 35 staff and we tend to attract a lot of um multilingual personnel because we do live in a very diverse yes you do and we want people to feel comfortable when they come to doctors or Waikiki because we want them to have that personal touch instead of calling a translation service that you can't see the individual across the screen we want to have that capability of having a personalized translator right next to you and I myself are fluent in um Mandarin Taiwanese and Cantonese and model my partner Dr. Trapowski speaks Slavic languages um and we have everything we have for Filipino um um to Spanish we have uh uh half uh one of my staff is half Chinese and half uh Mexican so she speaks fluent Spanish also wow so we are very talented here very diverse yes you are yes you are now uh and you have telemedicine do you or telehealth what's it called yes ma'am we also have the capability to do telehealth and telemedicine our platform that we use is very widespread use is called Doximi um that is we have the licensure for that to provide our patient base with the ability to do telemedicine and it works on almost the exact platform as this interview is and that way we can see talk of course we still can touch and examine you um but a lot of things we can especially during this pandemic pandemic yeah be able to see our patient and see how they're doing and we can do counseling over the telehealth platform also so we can provide reassurance and capability to uh have prescription called in and some orders for our laboratory diagnostic even without you coming in but eventually we still want to make sure that we we reached out and touched our patients too yeah now uh so you also have that beautiful automobile that you pick up people the tesla yes ma'am and where does that go we used to tesla before the pandemic started it was Waikiki is a very difficult place to navigate especially if you're a foreigner and when all the streets begin with the k right that's right and everything's a one way and the tesla was used during that time as a mode of picking up patients in the Waikiki area and during the pandemic since we don't have a large amount of patients in the Waikiki era we have not been utilizing it as much due to the fact that we did not want to expose our our drivers to uh catching oh yes of course yeah so that vehicle right now is you utilize more for delivering lab results and picking up equipment and dropping off lab specimen and so we got to utilize it differently and then that would spin also um if there's there's there's certain case by case scenario if somebody is really in the bind we will send out the card to pick up our patients okay now tell us uh exactly since this is a pandemic what you're doing you but what's the drive through now tell us about that what what does what does that mean drive through and you've got all of that hotel so what what's the drive yeah so what we did here at doctors for Waikiki is we i'm a retired army doc so i have all these acronyms in my my uh my arsenal so what i implied was having what we call a triple tp meaning you need testing you need treating you need tracking tracing and the p stats for the most important thing public support without all four we would have never kind of entered to flatten the curve and because we implemented that that helped us flatten the curve we have to say out of the 35,000 tests conducted statewide us as a small moderate size urban care has contributed to a large percentage of testing that's been done we first started with the first responder we wanted all the first responders to come in to get checked to make sure that if they're concerned about their exposure because they're still out and about picking up patients and making sure everybody's well we wanted to make sure that they feel safe when they go home just like me i'm at the front line i have a one-year-old at home i have a 10-year-old at home i have 70-year-old parents at home that support so i want to make sure that when i take care of patients when i go home they're safe i don't want my family members in jeopardy due to my profession and we we felt the concern of the first responders so we were the first one to do a drive for all the first responders and they got all the testing they got either a what we call a rapid test from selix this is the rapid blood test as fda approved this one is it's a blood test huh yes it's not the we do the nasal swab also and then now we have capabilities was a partnership with a clinical lab support if you've heard on the news as being this blood drop for antibody testing too so what that really tell us is is somebody exposed to coronavirus or COVID-19 and when they become positive we kind of can identify those individuals say are they still symptomatic if they are they will get the PCR swap and to do a confirmatory we will be drawing blood now since we have that new capability so whatever that is available outside we will obtain it to help our community we as a private entity can move a lot faster than a public entity due to the lack of bureaucracy and red tape that we don't have to deal with oh yes and remember all of these testing is voluntary so i'm so happy that the public understands this and they all want to sign up and we're still doing a lot of testing right now for the general public now because we have completely most of the first responder you know the first week and i did the drive i did about 500 first responder police fire ems in three days and that was exhausting but we did it my staff is amazing i we could never have done this so so the drive-through is through the hotel since nobody's at the hotel through the garage yes we have to get special permission i have to basically sign my life away to make sure that i i'm totally responsible for the entire hotel the whole structure then that was a huge thing but i was able to convince the hotel to let me utilize that and we did that um that was the first drive and then of course we continued to do in clinic testing throughout that that two weeks later we were able to do another big drive like that this time to include the essential workers include those people the flight attendants pilots the bankers the healthcare workers the the grocery people you know anybody who's still working and the essential by our state we offered this test to them and we did a great thing we did and that includes me because my daughter my daughter who's an rn hospice rn insisted that i be tested because keneth has this age and orange thing and to keep me from bringing home something she insisted that i go see you and have the test which came back negative thank you i can't disclose that without your permission on air so i'm glad you disclosed it yourself but yes that is um that's part of my job is to make sure that you and keneth is well taken care of too yep as she said as a caregiver as a caregiver i needed to be tested because i do go to the grocery store and what have you and she said rather than bring something home i needed to be tested so that's what i did and and you did that horrible nose thing i'm sorry but that that's where i know that you don't have it you know and you're clear and now you need to be of health oh yeah that so now you're back to treating normal people with asthma or whatever or is it are you still seeing this caseload of people being tested we have never faltered from our objectives that is taking care of anybody who needs urgent care but it's just as an urgent care center we also wanted to make sure that we are supporting our community by doing these testing but we throughout the drive we still have our our clinic operation and we're still taking care of the codes the asthma the gout the broken hands a broken nose we're still taking care of all of that in on top of all the testing we're doing so we have not slowed down we actually have uh expended our our staff number during this pandemic to keep up with the demand of health care that's during now you have some new doctors that i i don't know because uh i haven't been there for a while so tell me about your new doctors well we have three other physician staffs on board one is a another military physician who's still active guard right now currently and he will has shifts here because we do shift work here he does about 10 to 15 shift a month so that he can see patients also in an urgent care center we also have another hospital doctor from one of the big hospital here who worked with me when i was at how a pacific health film and he's also here about six to eight 10 shifts a month and then we have my good dear friend that we went to med school together and he trained at Hershey Pennsylvania a great hospitalist and now is a medical director for a big insurance company and he's working remotely but he doesn't want to lose his skillset from touching and caring for patients so he is also here about you know five to six shifts a month and that they can keep their clinical skills you mentioned shifts so we should tell people you're open till midnight yes ma'am yes so so we're we're operational daily we're operational holidays christmas christmas eve new york's day new york's eve we are operational because what we try to do is fill the gap the void just like this pandemic where all all the different physicians office are closed right now we're able to keep our doors open because we have sufficient personal protective equipment to keep my staff from getting infected with this covid and still offer quality healthcare for our population in our community and we are open every day we have not changed our hours we did not truncate our hours during this whole pandemic we are actually very happy that we as a whole as a team decided to do this because we have seen so much new patients that we have never taken care of before and there are all grateful for the service that we provide because they have no access to healthcare because their doctor's office is closed yeah and they call and call and nobody answered the phone call and if you belong to a big hospital facility as a primary care their hours are so truncated that you have to call between a certain hour to even speak with anybody let alone see a provider and that for us we thought that this is a great way to serve the community to make sure that we help those in need and there's a lot of chronic um medication chronic medical disease that need to be addressed and that's why we're here for and what speaking of chronic I understand you are going to do a heroic trip tomorrow tell us about where you're going sure well before we start into let people know that during this pandemic the entire state of Hawaii has conducted about only 35 000 tests just on loan on Oahu we have over 1.2 million people what that really equivalent to is only two percent of our entire population got tested and to me that's that is a very staggering fact and for tomorrow what my team and working together with the providers at leahi hospital is we are going to actually conduct testing for the entire staff at leahi um and they will be we'll bring all the test kits and doing all the swabs and um we'll be running a little drive for their um not only the providers but also their the maintenance workers their the house care workers their kitchen staff every single person that's on staff will get tested and we are going to make it was there on a pocket fee for them because that's kind of our way to say hey well I am so proud because we've heard so many horrible things about health about nursing homes and all of these things I haven't heard anything bad about Hawaii I'm sure it exists but I haven't heard it it's not national news but I think that what you're doing is just marvelous and I'm sure that there are other um health care facilities that need that are in need especially those where it's living in someone's home that's that's really scary however I am very proud of you and what you're doing and especially going to leahi and that's just such a wonderful thing and our kapuna need care and as an Asian population most people Asian people historically take care of the people so I'm very proud of you and I think they're trying to tell me I'm running out of time so it's been a pleasure visiting with you now tell us again where you're located and how we can meet you okay so we're located at the princess carolani hotel at 120 carolani avenue we're located on the lobby if you haven't been here with huge where five dollars square foot is an amazing facility and please check our website at www.doctorsowhikiki.com if you're concerned you aren't getting testing done please register online and we're taking testing by appointment only um due to the fact that we want to make sure that there's social distancing and we don't want a big cluster of people well again thank you so much and we'll see you next time all right aloha thank you marcia thank you