Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Digital startup HealthTap now allows doctors and patients to endorse skills, bedside manner

Digital health startup HealthTap began as a way to reduce the barriers between doctors and […]

Digital health startup HealthTap began as a way to reduce the barriers between doctors and patients.

The goal was (and continues to be) that HealthTap would connect people looking for reliable health information online with doctors who would answer their questions for free.

Now, in a bid to provide greater validation about a doctor, and enable a larger level of interaction, HealthTap is launching a new feature Thursday by which doctors can vote on the medical expertise of their peers, while patients can vote on the softer skills, or their bedside manner.

Much like Facebook where a “Like” button exists but not a “Dislike”  button, doctors and patients only have the option to vote in favor of a certain expertise or behavior trait. If they feel, a doctor doesn’t have a particular trait, they simply leave the category blank.

“We realized that it is very very difficult to determine who is the best doctor for [any] particular problem,” said Ron Gutman, HealthTap’s founder and CEO in an interview Tuesday. “For example, if for some reason you would need to have retina surgery … there is not even one place today for consumers to determine ‘Who is the best retina surgeon?’ We are dependent upon a doctor referring us to a surgeon. Even doctors themselves don’t have a way to determine quality.”

That was the genesis of the peer/patient voting mechanism. All doctors on HealthTap – there are more than 16,000 that actively answer patient’s questions on the site – are not required to use the new feature. Only when they nominate themselves, or when they are nominated by someone, does the voting feature kick in. While doctors will vote for peers based on specific skills, patients will vote on whether a doctor is dedicated, nurturing, inspiring and so on.

Patients will be able to see who voted for each doctor. This transparency posed a problem on the doctor side. How would doctors react to knowing that a certain peer did not vote for them on a certain medical skill?

Gutman initially said that he was leaning toward releasing all that information but had made no final decision. Later, a spokesman confirmed that HealthTap will share some of the voting information. Doctors will be shown only a sample of peers who had voted for them but not the entire list.

In the end, the goal is to let the cream rise to the top.

We are encouraging quality, we are encouraging meritocracy,” Gutman declared. “So if you are a great doctor and you know that you are great and you know that your peers trust you and that people love, you’re going to promote it heavily.”

San Francisco-based HealthTap is the “fastest growing digital health startup” Gutman claimed, but declined to say how many people are registered users of the site that are not doctors.

 

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