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Ask HN: Would you book an appointment with your doctor on Facebook?

2 points by tekram ↗ HN
If your doctor had a Facebook page, would you feel comfortable booking an appointment through a widget on their FB page? How about if they were using Messenger and you could chat with them to book an appointment? Does the convenience out weigh any concerns you may have over privacy issue? Lets assume that you would only be booking an appointment and not providing anything more than your name and contact info.

Background: I am one of the founder at Luma Health. We are trying to make it easier for patients to see their doctor.

5 comments

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smt88
I'd do neither. It's not necessarily a privacy thing because my health info isn't very sensitive and FB already knows absolutely everything about me.

It's more that Facebook is a place where I socialize, read news, and find local events. Booking a doctor's appt is a totally different use of the service and feels as weird as, for example, doing video calls through YouTube.

I also think people have been burned by the "I think I'm doing something private on FB, but it somehow got published" experience in the past, and this would make them super nervous.

And, finally, I'd imagine this would violate HIPAA laws because Facebook's DB would be holding sensitive health data about your users, so I'm not even sure this is legal without a partnership with Facebook and their own HIPAA compliance.

Edit: HN is also a bad place to ask about this because a lot of people here are privacy wonks and won't even use Gmail or Facebook. Researching products for general consumers is fairly uninformative here.

Edit 2: Actually, I'm sort of horrified if you don't already know the HIPAA implications. Doesn't your company deal with those every day?

ljk
never. HIPPA violation
QuinnyPig
How in the world would this comply with HIPAA? Facebook makes no bones about the fact that they have no interest in handling regulated medical data...

And if you don't think the fact that I booked an appointment with a specialist is HIPAA protected, I suggest you dig into the regulations that control your market a bit more.

lioeters
I'd never do it either, not because of privacy concerns but ethical reasons against Facebook benefitting from whatever they gather about such transactions.

To the other commenters, I'm sure the poster is aware of HIPAA. Luma Health works with Aptible, an "HIPAA Security and Compliance Platform". (Source: https://www.lumahealth.io/about-us/ near the bottom, and https://www.aptible.com/)

tekram
Thanks for your comments.

This was informative. My question was not so much whether this is HIPAA compliant. There are obvious problems. My question was whether people have the appetite for even wanting to book an appointment on FB. Smt88's comment on YouTube and video call says it all. My sentiments were the same.