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Ask HN: Help with Choosing a Doctor?

9 points by tekram ↗ HN
I am co-founder at a health care startup and and we are interested in building a service to help people find doctors. In talking to folks, we have found people value opinions of their friends and family in choosing a doctor over review websites like Yelp or HealthGrade. However, we have found some people hesitant to reach out to friends/family as it can understandably be a sensitive issue. We are trying to make this process a little easier.

1. Poll Your Friends/Family - This would be an easy way to send a request out to friends (whether from FB, Gmail, etc.) asking them for help in choosing a doc in an anonymous way. For example, someone may be looking for a good psychiatrist but this can be a hard to share unless done in an anonymous way. We would have pre-loaded data on several physicians making it easier for all involved to browse through options.

2. Free Personal Health Advisor - This would be a real person helping you choose a doctor. There are my nuances to choosing a doctor that many might not be aware of like choosing one in the same health care system.

Thanks! Would love to hear thoughts.

11 comments

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lastofus
I recently moved to another state and decided I need to find a doc. I've had the hardest time trying to find a doc, but at the same time I don't have a large social network local to the area to draw upon.

My concerns in order of importance:

* Does a doc take my insurance

* Are they with in a 20min driving radius

* Are they taking new patients

* Are they not terrible at their job

* Are they remotely personable

* Differentiating between different GP specialties was a bit confusing (internal medicine, family practice, etc)

With 20-30 or so docs in the area to choose from, I'm just going to have to roll the dice and see if things work out. Anything to help make this choice easier would be awesome.

tekram
Before seeing a doc, how do you figure out "Are they not terrible at their job" and "Are they remotely personable"?
lastofus
Other than the existing review sites, I really don't have any way to know. The only way for me to find out is to set an appointment, hence why I would love a better way.
tekram
Got it. Friends/family would be a great source.
aheilbut
ZocDoc addresses this problem really well.
tekram
Not everyone is on ZocDoc and they have poor penetration in many geographies like SF area. In fact, many docs do not like ZocDoc. In addition, ZocDoc does well with smaller practices but not mid size and larger. The way health care smaller practices are going away.
socalnate1
How about being able to assign a value to certain attributes, and then recommend the highest "scoring" doctors?

For instance, accepting my insurance is incredibly important (100 points), being the same gender as me is a somewhat important (25 points), having a doctor under 45 is important to me (35 points), speaking a language other than English isn't important at all (0 points), etc, etc.

I am effectively applying this sort of algorithm now when choosing a doctor, but it would be nice to have it explicit and faster than looking up all the information on each doctors page.

tekram
That sounds interesting. Out of curiosity, what sites do you use to gather info on docs?
staunch
Make it easy to browse the data and see how they choose.
tekram
Betterdoctor.com does this to a certain extent but does not have all of the nuances mentioned above.
askafriend
I'm curious, have you explored how ZocDoc works? It's what I used when I was clueless about finding a doctor.