Doctify: Empowering patients to make the most important decisions
Earlier this year, Beringea and my colleague Carrie Babcock led a $10m investment into Doctify, a platform for patient reviews of health and social care. I’ve known Stephanie Eltz, one of Doctify’s co-founders, for a long time now, and I’m endlessly impressed with what she’s been building.
Doctify is a business that I have materially benefitted from personally — so I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on why this is such an incredible business, providing such a vital service that we should all stand to benefit from.
What’s the most important decision you make in life?
A partner, a place to live, a career? Where to go on holiday, a new car? Also consider — what’s the one material expense that every one of us will incur at some point?
How about: what doctor can actually treat my cancer? Which specialist can I trust to diagnose my sick child? Does the surgeon who is about to operate on me have the qualifications, experience, and track-record that I need to overcome this? As sure as death and taxes, everyone on the planet will at some point need a medical professional.
For many of life’s decisions, we’ve built online resources to help us make informed choices: holidays (TripAdvisor); homes (Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com); cars (Consumer Reports, Edmunds); relationships (Match, Bumble); but, we’ve next to no options when it comes to the most important decision — who am I going to trust with my health, my family’s wellbeing, or even my life?
Let’s say you’ve injured your knee (we’ve all been there!) — how do you find the right orthopaedic specialist to diagnose your issue and provide treatment. Your GP might be a good place to start for a referral, but their experience is likely to be limited to specialists they’ve worked with before. Friends and family are similar. You may get lucky and find someone who had a similar issue and had a great experience, but how do you know that their doctor is the best option for your injury?
Doctify helps alleviate the information disparity between the medical profession and patients, allowing patients to take control and make informed decisions about their providers.
Why doesn’t Doctify already exist?
Doctify is a much-needed panacea in a market that has traditionally been extremely opaque, so why hasn’t it been built before?
Doctify can best be compared to TripAdvisor for healthcare providers. From clinicians to dentists, care homes, and healthcare practices, Doctify allows patients to access tens of thousands of validated patient reviews and make the best, most informed, decision about which provider to choose.
While medical professionals have their patients’ best interests at heart, no single GP or referrer would be able to know all of the potential specialists offhand and take an inventory of patient reviews, outcomes, levels of training and experience, etc. Doctify works in conjunction with doctors to improve patient outcomes.
Gathering enough information to give patients a platform to decide takes time, and minimum scale. A handful of scattered doctors across the country isn’t as helpful as a well organized and heavily reviewed directory of thousands of specialists nationwide. It’s a big undertaking to build that minimum scale, and Doctify has done the hard yards to become the most respected name in the industry. The company’s founders, being doctors themselves (see below!), have also been in a unique position to credibly build these relationships over the years.
An unlikely team driving exceptional outcomes.
Doctify’s success is driven by the tenacity of its extraordinary founders: Stephanie and Suman. Stephanie’s rigorous and lengthy training as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon meant more than a decade of education and residency. Along the way, she spotted many barriers facing patients and professionals seeking successful experiences and outcomes.
During her residency, she put her reputation on the line to complete patient and hospital studies to highlight areas where the hospital was under-delivering to senior medical teams and management, and she recommended procedures to deliver better patient outcomes.
While she was initially received with some bewilderment and a dose of scepticism, her reliance on actual data and patient outcomes was irrefutable, and the hospital implemented her plans.
Having seen patients’ frustrations at grappling with such an opaque market, the initial incarnation of Doctify was born. At first an integrated product for scheduling, reviews, and patient management, it quickly became apparent the review system was driving the greatest impact for patients and doctors.
Suman similar spent seven years working as a trauma and orthopaedic specialist before joining an NHS programme to drive innovation and better patient outcomes. His work there helped him recognize the opportunity for patient empowerment, giving patients control over their own life decisions and journeys.
Suman is uniquely able to speak to the medical community, with a deep understanding of the frustrations and challenges they face in trying to deliver the best for their patients, and he has been integral to establishing a business model that is not based on ads or paid-for reviews — unlike most other operators in this space.
Together they make a unique, formidable, and incredibly tenacious team who we believe will drive amazing commercial outcomes through transforming the lives of millions of patients worldwide.
A better model, not based on advertising
Doctify earns revenue through subscriptions from doctors and practices, not through advertising or patient subscriptions. The business is quickly achieving scale, as Doctify becomes a ‘must have’ product for practitioners, the same way showcasing with a minimum number of reviews is important when renting on AirBnB.
This business model means that doctors are the customers, while patients are a beneficiary. The heritage of the founders means they recognize that the medical community deserves great respect and they know first hand how stretched and stressed the system can become, all while the individuals at the heart of it are trying their best to save and improve lives. You might notice the vast majority of reviews on Doctify are positive — this is likely related to using Doctify’s tools to match the most appropriate provider to the patient’s specific need, which can mean better outcomes. I might argue that simply signing up to Doctify is a good signal a provider goes out of their way to do their best for their patients.
The non-ad funded software model, and cooperation with the medical community, means that Doctify is a much more sustainable and predictable business in addition to being a genuine life improver.
