HealthTap's growth validates hypotheses about doctors and patients

A major round of funding for HealthTap gave me the opportunity to talk again with founder Ron Gutman, whom I interviewed earlier this year. You can get an overview of HealthTap from that posting or from its own web site. Essentially, HealthTap is a portal for doctors to offer information to patients and potential patients. In this digital age, HealthTap asks, why should a patient have to make an appointment and drive to the clinic just to find out whether her symptoms are probably caused by a recent medication? And why should a doctor repeat the same advice for each patient when the patient can go online for it?

Now, with 6,000 participating physicians and 500 participating health care institutions, HealthTap has revealed two interesting and perhaps unexpected traits about doctors:

  • Doctors will take the time to post information online for free. Many observations, including my own earlier posting, questioned whether they’d take the time to do this. The benefits of posting information is that doctors can demonstrate their expertise, win new patients, and cut down on time spent answering minor questions.

  • Doctors are willing to rate each other. This can be a surprise in a field known for its reluctance to break ranks and doctors’ famous unwillingness to testify in malpractice lawsuits. But doctors do make use of the “Agree” button that HealthTap provides to approve postings by other doctors. When they press this button, they add the approved posting to their own web page (Virtual Practice), thus offering useful information to their own patients and others who can find them through search engines and social networks. The “Agree” ratings also cause postings to turn up higher when patients search for information on HealthTap, and help create a “Trust Score” for the doctor.

HealthTap, Gutman assures me, is not meant to replace doctors’ visits, although online chats and other services in the future may allow patients to consult with doctors online. The goals of HealthTap remain to the routine provision of information that’s easy for doctors to provide online, and to make medicine more transparent so patients know their doctors, before treatment and throughout their relationships.

HealthTap has leapt to a new stage with substantial backing from Tim Chang (managing director of Mayfield Fund), Eric Schmidt (through his Innovation Endeavors) and Rowan Chapman (Mohr Davidow Ventures). These VCs provide HealthTap with the funds to bring on board the developers, as well as key product and business development hires, required to scale up its growing operations. These investors also lend the business the expertise of some of the leaders in the health IT industry.

tags: , , ,