Health IT, Hospitals

Treatspace wants to give doctors control of their online info, patients a trusted source

It happens all the time. People Google a doctor and find one website that says […]

It happens all the time. People Google a doctor and find one website that says he’s an optometrist while another says he’s an ophthalmologist. Or, it says he’s located at an old address.

This kind of inconsistent or outdated information about doctors causes mistrust in patients, according to the founders of the digital health startup Treatspace, who are taking it upon themselves to create a trusted place for patients to get information about doctors.

On Treatspace, doctors create a professional profile — much like they would do on LinkedIn — with verifiable facts about their practice. According to Matt Stadler, one of the company’s co-founders, details about the process and technology that Treatspace uses to verify that users are in fact the doctors they claim to be are still confidential but are a critical differentiator for the company.

Doctors can share their Treatspace identity with their patients directly, and patients can also invite their existing doctors to the site. Patients can then “follow” physicians to get updates, and the team is also building a HIPAA-compliant direct communication system, Stadler said.

“Our primary objective is to strengthen the existing relationships between doctors and their patients,” Stadler said.  “A search function aimed at finding a new doctor is not an initial value point.  Doctor participation in the system is by choice, not by aggregation and auto filling of profiles.”

A second set of features on the site is in alpha mode but is being kept on the down low for now, according to Stadler, who described them just as tools that strengthen the relationship online between doctors and patients.

“We’re doing proactive reputation management,” Stadler said. “All of the products and services that we’re doing are transparent and maintain trust.”

The site is currently in a public beta mode and has secured its first paying customers. Those paying customers are doctors who want premium services beyond the most basic functions of the site, which are free to users.

A big part of the company’s focus, Stadler said, came as a result of participating in Startup Weekend Pittsburgh, at which the team took home the top prize. Since then, Treatspace has joined AlphaLab, a Pittsburgh incubator.

The next milestone will be opening a seed round of financing to grow the team and transition from beta testing to release, Stadler said. So far, the company has received some capital from the incubator but has otherwise been bootstrapped. Both co-founders are repeat entrepreneurs — Rick Cancelliere has a background in medical marketing and Web, and Stadler is a chemist by training.

They’re working in a hot space, alongside secure digital communication providers like DocBookMD and Doctor Connect, but are hoping their focus on providing good information and enabling trust will give them an edge.

“We are positioning the value around the nature of the interactions and features, not around the volume of system users,” Stadler said.

[Photo from Treatspace]

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