November 6, 2012
October 2, 2012
Medical app HealthTap launches feature that lets doctors translate medical research for the masses
HealthTap, an app allowing users to ask questions of a community of more than 15,000 medical doctors, is beefing up its mobile and Web application. It is integrating the wealth of published medical data in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database with its existing services.
The doctors cannot offer diagnoses to patients on HealthTap, but they can answer questions as more people turn to the Web for medical information.
The company announced Monday that it is integrating research from peer-reviewed medical journals into its network of doctors, allowing them an opportunity to respond to users’ questions and to translate medical research from doctor-speak to plain English.
The explanations doctors provide are — like their advice — rated by their peers. The better the community deems their colleague’s contribution to be, the higher their rating. In that way, the app serves as both informative for users who need advice on health issues and, potentially, great public relations for doctors in search of new patients.The new feature, called “MedPubs,” now offers the entire PubMed database and the peer-reviewed research submission and rating feature. The research database is indexed, with relevant research filed under a “known-for” list available via a doctor’s profile page.
HealthTap also offers a paid ($9.99) private messaging service, where users can speak with a doctor one-on-one. The service, according to chief executive Ron Gutman, is the first HIPAA-secure platform for mobile and desktop Web to be provided by a company.
“We’re extremely excited about the release of HealthTap Medical Publications, because it does something meaningful and important – it truly democratizes the highest quality medical knowledge,” Gutman said Saturday.
Gutman added later that “hundreds of new doctors” have joined the app as well as a “huge number of new signups from users.”
September 12, 2012
Have a pressing medical question? There's an app for that:
(Credit:HealthTap)
That's exactly what HealthTap is attempting to do for its users. The website and app, available on iPhone, iPad and Android, connects regular people with more than 14,000 U.S. licensed physicians in 115 different specialties who can answer questions about medical concerns. It's not the only app out there attempting to answer patient's pressing questions, but it claims to be the only one that contains a HIPAA-secure feature to send out medical records, meaning that private conversations you have with a doctor are considered confidential.
While founder and CEO of HealthTap Ron Gutman's experience is in business, he's worked with organizations including Stanford University on their personalized health care systems for about a decade. What he realized over that time was people turn to the Internet for their health questions. Google had reported receiving 1.4 billion searches on health every month, and more than 80 percent of people reported using the Internet for health information, according to a PEW survey. That same survey revealed that 59 percent of people with chronic conditions and 40 percent without called online health information useless.
"If people already go to the Internet, let's figure out why they are so disappointed, why they are so unhappy with the information they find," Gutman told HealthPop. "We started doing research and focus groups and discovered that people find a lot of information on the Internet, but they don't know who to trust because every search that you are running (pulls up) multiple websites, and everyone says something else."
What people said they trusted were doctors: More than 90 percent of surveyed participants said they honored their physicians' opinions the most.
The way HealthTap works is any user can ask any question, which will be answered by one of the physicians, who are all screened and guaranteed to be in good standing. The question and answer (but not the asker's name or account) will be posted publicly for all the other registered members to see.
"HealthTap is the only place on the Internet... that you can ask any questions and you can get an answer from a U.S. licensed physician sometimes in minutes but definitely less than 24 hours for free," he said.
(Credit: HealthTap)
While paying $9.99 for a question may seem costly, Gutman explained that the average person who doesn't have insurance pays about $200 each visit and co-pays average out to about $29. Seeing that 25 percent of all doctor's visits are just patients asking questions, he feels the app not only saves time for both parties but also provides quick, accurate reassurance.
Dr. Patrick Weix, an obstetrician/gynecologist in Irving, Texas, who is one of the doctors featured on HealthTap, liked using the app, but didn't realize how valuable a tool it could be until he answered a question from a woman asking if antidepressant medication was safe for pregnant women. A few days later, the woman was thanking him in his office for his quick response - he hadn't recognized her on the app as one of his patients. She told him that she didn't want to call anyone about the question even though it was bothering her because it was the weekend, but the app allowed her to get her concerns answered quickly.
The app may also help curb incorrect self-diagnoses, which have been spurred by the ease of searching for medical conditions online or finding answers that may not pertain to a specific case. One time, Weix noticed a message from a young woman who was concerned that she might be pregnant because she had unprotected sex. She had looked up some symptoms online, and even though she had her period and tested negative on a pregnancy test, she was still concerned. While Weix reassured her that there was a very minute chance she was pregnant, he realized that the symptoms she was experiencing might be from an STD and urged her to get tested.
With so many symptoms shared by a variety of diseases, just searching for what you are experiencing online might not give you a correct diagnosis, Weix said. While HealthTap doctors can't 100 percent tell you what's going on with you, they can at least steer you in the right direction.
"If you have headaches, fever and a cold, you can have anything to dengue fever to Ebola to sinusitis," Weix explained. "But, it's not likely that you have dengue fever or Ebola: You probably have sinusitis."
Dr. Bradley Flansbaum, an internist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, agrees with Weix. Although he is not involved in HealthTap, he can see benefits of doctors helping people find out what's wrong with them without the patient having to pay a fee or take time out of their daily lives.
"There are countervailing forces," Flansbaum said. "We can dwell on the negative of people doing their own research, but what about the features in which people do their own research and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room and get their questions adequately answered and get a better sense of well-being?"
There are some benefits for physicians as well. Gutman explained that if a person likes answers from a specific doctor, they can set up an appointment with him or her directly.
But what Weix finds most helpful is reading other doctor's explanations about medical terminology. He said it's often hard to explain procedures to the average person without slipping into complicated scientific words and concepts. For example, he'd have difficulties describing what organs are removed for different types of hysterectomies, but now he uses another doctor's simplified answer he found on the site.
"It's really a good way to explain it so most people can understand it," he said. "There's a reason why not everybody goes to medical school. It takes a lot of time, but a lot of people have these problems."
Still, Weix doesn't tell all his patients to jump on the app and ask him questions any time they like. He admits that he's only answering questions a couple times a week, and that if someone wants a response from him, they're better off contacting him directly if it's an emergency or setting up an appointment for an answer. That's part of the problem of the app, he pointed out: A lot of times, the best answer for the question is that the person should make an appointment and see their medical provider.
"I don't think it's the be all and end all," he explained. "I don't think that's it's the answer to all health questions, but I do think it is a good way for physicians to get and answer questions."
Flansbaum added that medical apps like HealthTap are exciting and new technology and the positive or negative impact on the health care industry won't be known for quite some time.
"We're in an early phase of app development and the use of different kinds of platforms of medical care," Flansbaum said. "To render opinions on what will work and what won't work is premature. We're going to have test these things and see how it goes."
August 3, 2012
The Doctors' Smartphones Will See You Now = NO WAIT
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| Unwavering Commitment to Excellence in Patient Services Health Tap has just released a new line of apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, and the web in order to connect people with more than 12,000 U.S. licensed doctors at any time to answer health-related questions of all kinds. Health Tap is the first and the only company to provide a very specific selection of physicians to help the public find information on the health topics in which they care about most – all for free.  Their goal is to encourage the public to be more engaged in their own health by providing them with a free and easy-to-use service. Studies have shown that more than 80 percent of internet users seek their health information/questions online, and it’s now becoming a mobile trend. Some of the most useful features include:
“Everyone needs reliable, fast and independent answers to their health questions that come from a caring source they can trust. Working with millions of consumers and more than 12,000 physicians, we’ve learned that the vast majority of people put their trust in doctors, first and foremost, when it comes to their health,” said Founder and CEO of HealthTap Ron Gutman in a press release. “That’s why we’ve created the first comprehensive, consumer-facing mobile health platform and brought on board thousands of the best and most engaged licensed doctors in the U.S. We’re giving people – for the first time – mobile, affordable, and immediate access to top quality health experts and information they can trust.” You can sign up for a free account at HealthTap.com. |
July 28, 2012
HealthTap For All = Free Second Opinions
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| Unwavering Commitment to Excellence in Patient Services |
HealthTap Puts a Doctor On Your Smartphone, Helps You Find a Good One to See In Person
iOS/Android/Web: The last time we mentioned HealthTap, their mobile app connected you with doctors who could answer your health questions at any time, right on your smartphone. Now, HealthTap has improved its service to give you personal and private medical consultations, a directory of local doctors, all ranked by quality, and the ability to schedule in-person appointments right through the app.
You can still use HealthTap to ask doctors your questions and get push notifications of their responses, but you can also reach out to a live doctor to ask personal, private health questions that you may not want to schedule an appointment for. Those doctors will give you their own credentials, answer your questions, and then refer you to an in-person appointment if necessary.
When it's time to schedule that appointment, HealthTap can help you find a good doctor in your area. The service assigns doctors a "DocScore," which uses publicly available information and peer-reviews as ranking criteria. Select the doctor you want to see, check if they accept your insurance, and then use the app to make an appointment. When you get there, you can even use HealthTap to unlock and share your personal health records (which the app claims are kept secure and encrypted at all times), right from your iOS or Android device.
HealthTap is free to download and use, but some features, like those virtual private consultations, will set you back $9.99 per question (and each question includes one free follow-up question, after which it's $4.99 to keep asking.) You can even upload images or video to go with your question when you ask. Everything else, including search, doctor scores, and appointments, are all free.
While the idea of talking to a doctor through the web may seem a little impersonal, I can see a place for affordable, personal care without the wait or a trip to the ER, and being able to take your medical history with you in case of emergencies.
June 3, 2012
This App Will Change Everything About Healthcare
HealthTap is an app available on iOS, Android, and the web that lets people ask medical questions of real doctors and get quick answers in return.
The app is the brainchild of Ron Gutman, a serial entrepreneur working to shake up the healthcare industry in the best way possible.
A Pew study on the relationship between the internet and healthcare revealed that 59% of Americans (including the author) have searched for health information online. The obvious issue here is the matter of trust -- how credible is the information that you find?
HealthTap aims to solve this problem by connecting you with its network of real, living doctors to ask whatever question you need answered. It currently boasts 11,500 doctors in all 50 states, covering 112 different specialties (some as specific as aerospace medicine).
How is it that doctors are legally able to dispense medical advice over the internet outside of the US healthcare system? HealthTap teamed up with Lloyd's of London to create a new type of liability insurance that's never existed before. It enables doctors to interact with people exclusively over HealthTap, which is pretty cool.
HealthTap has a rigorous onboarding process for doctors that want to participate. Doctors need to be licensed in the US, in good standing, and have no disciplinary actions against them. In these respects, HealthTap is stricter than the state licensing board.
So why would doctors spend lots of time dispensing medical knowledge on the internet for free? It's a way for them to publicize their practice and attract new real-life patients. There are also residual SEO benefits, making it easier for people to find the doctor online and see that he or she has an active web presence. And because HealthTap automatically directs questions to doctors based on their specialties, doctors get to answer questions they care about.
HealthTap is very big on this idea of its community being a "transparent meritocracy" -- as doctors answer questions, users can "Thank" doctors for helpful answers. The doctors can "Agree" with answers provided to questions by other doctors. If a question has lots of doctors agreeing with the answer, you can probably rest safe in its accuracy.
We were excited about the potential for this app and couldn't wait to try it.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-app-that-will-change-everything-about-healthcare-2012-5?op=1#ixzz1wlU29RZg
April 18, 2012
HealthTap Uncovers The Secret Knowledge Network Of Doctors, Online
Through radical transparency and community rewards, HealthTap aspires to become the default national rating and search destination for patients seeking physicians. If it can better match patients to treatments and doctors than Google, then it's well on its way.
Though the Internet has opened up access to much of world's information, finding a specialist for medical advice still requires the age-old process of personally asking a doctor to suggest a trusted colleague. "There's just no way in the world to do it right now, short of going to a primary care physician," says HealthTap founder Ron Gutman, who wants to expose the hidden knowledge that exists among practicing doctors about who the best physicians are for specific treatments.
HealthTap, a medical social network for users seeking personalized, public advice from registered doctors, tells Fast Company that it is releasing an eBay-like rating system for its more than 10,000 participating doctors and their relevant expertise. We spoke with Gutman about how his system has incentivized doctors to go against the taboo of cricitizing their peers, how transparency brings credibility to online medical advice, and how HealthTap translates conversational descriptions of symptoms into medical language their doctors can respond to.
Incentivize Against Taboos
"Physicians are very loath to criticize each other, for fear that they will be criticized themselves," says Dr. Geoff Rutledge, HealthTap's Chief Medical Information Officer, who was a Harvard medical researcher before being executive at Healtheon, which eventually became WebMD. The taboo against public naysaying, argues Rutledge, has kept the Internet at bay, while other industries are transformed by more openness.
HealthTap's solution to encourage doctors to evalute their colleagues was to keep everything positive: Doctors can either agree with a solution proposed by a colleague or offer their own. As with Facebook, on HealthTap, there is no "dislike" button. "By defining everything that's good, you can then choose among all the best answers, without having this aura or fear that individuals are being criticized."
Racking up kudos like gold coins in Mario Brothers feeds the ever-present desire for repute in the medical community and a steady supply of patients. As HealthTap grows in size, and reels in more prestigious doctors (Harvard Medical School is the most popular school in the network), HealthTap has the aim of being the most comprehensive national ranking system for doctors.
The user interface itself is decked out in referral buttons and awards galore. Answers are accompanied by a giant "thank" button in the top right hand corner, and a doctor's avatar is decorated like a military uniform, with their HealhTap score and expertise placed directly under their name. The doctor profile pages themselves prominently display the total number of patients they've reached, how many lifetime "thanks" and "agrees" they received. Like a wall of plaques in their office, the profile page prominently displays HealthTap's own version of awards, some as silly as the "Healthcliff Huxtable award" for receiving 50 total "thanks."
The new "Docscore" will tally all of this into a number, and include "a physician’s network (i.e. what other physicians the doctor in question follows and vice versa, as well as the number and nature of interactions within the network). The number of physicians who refer patients or content to a particular doctor is also taken into account, along with a variety of trust-related data points collected about the physician from other online resources," according to Gutman.
In other words, HealthTap aspires to create the national rating sytem for doctors and their expertise, using their own proprietary measures, making them the default rating for medical advice.
Yet, the cacophony of awards and ratings begs the question of whether HealthTap's ratings reflect a doctor's actual quality.
Community Truth
"At the end of the day, what you are getting as a patient is the physician's community opinion on a certain question," says Gutman. HealthTap, he says, can't objectively verify whether the answers being given or the doctors given them on their network is better than just going straight to a nearby specialist. But, he argues, neither can a doctor's visit: HealthTap simply mimics the process of getting a recommended solution in person, exposes it to a broader network, and lets the patient decide from (ideally) a wider buffet of possible choices.
Indeed, it may even incentivize doctors to discuss a point of disagreement more, since they have a vested interest in gaining a network of support. "What HealthTap allows them to do is to go and grow a coalition."
HealthTap does not require board certification, only that they are licensed to practice medicine. In an email expressing concern about HealthTap to the New York Times, American Medical Association President Peter Carmel wrote that he hopes online medical advice can “complement, not replace, the communication between a patient and their physician."
For Dr. Rutledge, HealthTap is about exposing more information than was previously available, which allows users to seek out the best specialist who can help them on and offline. "The user can see who has agreed with the answer, so they can evaluate the evaluator, if you will, through the system," he says. In other words, HealthTap is betting that radical transparency and authentic identities can be as meaningful as the otherwise opaque knowledge network that exists among doctors.
A Translator For Colloquialism
Searching Google for medical answers can often turn up irrelevant or spam-y results. For example, when this question was searched in Google, "Cellulitis from a spider bite, and hepatitis C. Is this serious?," it wasn't easy to find the fact that Hepititus C could be a serious complication. On HealthTap, their new algorithm alerts specialists and returns a potentially more relevant answer: "Hep C which includes interferon are generally immunesupressed. This is serious and need to be started on antibiotics, and may need intravenous antibiotics as soon as possible depending on the severity of infection," wrote one doctor.
In a personal conversation, an experienced physician could quickly translate symptoms and colloquial names into the precise medical language a patient needs to seek more information and the right specialist.
To replicate this in-person experience, HealthTap is launching a comprehensive mapping database, to connect all the conventional search terms to their precise medical code. "For example," writes Gutman, "if someone hears that they’re at risk for Marfan’s disease, do they know that they should see a rheumatologist?"
If their mapping database can better match patients to treatments and doctors than Google, then HealthTap may be on its (ambitious) way to being the default national rating and search destination. Regardless of how successful their system might be, HealthTap has given us a glimpse of how radical transparency and gaming can change the profession of medicine.
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