How Do Hims & Hers Prioritize Patient Care?
Millions of people have come to the Hims & Hers platforms looking for help finding solutions for the health and wellness issues that affect their day-to-day lives. We’re happy to be a part of filling a gap in the current healthcare system that too often fails to provide people with accessible, affordable medical care and treatment. Some people may wonder whether healthcare provided through an online platform, often referred to as “telehealth,” can also be high-quality and safe. The answer is yes, and we want you to know a little more about how telehealth works and what we do at Hims & Hers to prioritize your quality of care and keep you safe.
We’re proud of the telehealth platforms we’ve built, and provide full transparency on the way it works so you can rest assured about the quality of care you receive when you come to us for help finding solutions to health concerns.
We want you to feel confident in the answers to these questions about how we work:
How do I know my doctor has a strong medical background?
How do doctors and pharmacies get information about me they need to make safe decisions?
What’s the process to get a prescription?
What do Hims & Hers protect my personal information?
Highly Credentialed, Qualified Providers
Every day the Hims & Hers platforms are helping more and more people connect with highly qualified healthcare providers.
Doctors you are connected with through the Hims & Hers platforms are part of our partner physician network, Bailey Health, which itself is controlled by experienced physicians. Each Bailey Health doctor has been put through a rigorous credentialing and approval process by Bailey Health before being able to provide services through the platforms. This process was designed with the input of our medical advisory board, which includes the Chief of Medical Dermatology at Stanford Health Care and the Director of Male Reproductive and Sexual Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.
Your Bailey Health doctor must be licensed to practice medicine in your state, board-certified in an applicable specialty, and in good standing with the American Medical Association (AMA). They must also have a solid track record of previously serving patients in an appropriate clinical care setting. On average, doctors providing services through the platforms have at least 14 years of experience practicing medicine, and in some cases up to 35 years.
And, these doctors must comply with all the same rules, regulations and standards that govern good medical practice in an in-person setting, as well as stringent requirements that apply to the use of telehealth.
To apply to be a provider with Bailey Health and offer services on the Hims & Hers platforms, a physician must submit detailed credential information for review, which is cross-checked against professional licensing agencies to ensure physician quality. They also go through a comprehensive interview process and submit a written test to Bailey Health to ensure clinical skill and quality. Those materials are then reviewed by a Bailey Health advisory board of 12 Bailey Health physicians to ensure that only the most qualified applicants become Bailey Health providers and are approved to provide services through the Hims & Hers platforms. If a physician is approved to join the Bailey Health network, they then complete rigorous onboarding before using the platforms and have regular, ongoing training sessions to ensure they are delivering great care to you. This review and approval process was created with the help and advice of the Hims
At the end of the day, doctors on the Hims & Hers platforms have one singular priority: what’s in the best interest of their patients. In fact, the relationships between Hims & Hers, the Bailey Health network, and the Bailey Health physicians are specifically designed to ensure that nothing influences a physician’s decision-making other than what’s best for you.
How do we do this? Among other things, unlike many traditional healthcare settings where physicians are reimbursed by insurance based upon the number of visits or procedures they conduct, Bailey Health physicians are paid by the hour. Many of us have had the experience of spending 45 minutes waiting in a doctor’s office only to have a 5 minute conversation with the doctor before they have to rush off to their next visit. The Bailey Health physicians’ hourly payment structure ensures that the physicians’ only focus is on the patient in front of them and that they are actually incentivized to really take their time with patients — not to write prescriptions or speed through to the next patient.
Bailey Health physicians are also paid directly by Bailey Health from medical consultation fees collected by patients: they are not paid by Hims & Hers. All of this means that each physician’s priority and ultimate customer truly is the patient.
In addition, there are hundreds of specific regulatory requirements that we at Hims & Hers, as well as the Bailey Health physicians, comply with on an hourly basis to ensure patient safety, and we wouldn’t work any other way. Your well being is our top priority.
Patient Information
One aspect of the commitment we make to patient safety is to ensure both doctors and patients have the information they need about each other to build a strong doctor-patient relationship, and that physicians and pharmacies have the information they need to keep patients safe.
Hims & Hers collects specific identifying information from you and, together with the physicians, verifies the accuracy of the information you submit at multiple touch points during your consultation, similar to the process you’d experience at an in-person doctor visit. We do this to protect your quality of care and make sure both you and your doctor can be confident the information and care you are receiving.
When you log into the Hims & Hers platforms to connect with a doctor, you’re asked for both your ID and to provide a selfie that’s been taken in the last 24 hours to verify your identity. This is to ensure that the physician feels confident in the identify of the person they are treating and helps verify they are receiving accurate information to make informed treatment decisions.
This information is then sent through our secure platform to a doctor for review, along with your detailed medical questionnaire. The doctor then manually reviews the patient’s ID and selfie to personally double check that the patient is who they say they are, and confirm that they are treating the right person. Once your information is verified, the doctor can review medical charts, your corresponding health questionnaire, as well as diagnostic photos patients upload.
The dynamic online questionnaires each patient fills out has also been specifically designed with redundancies to ask the same question in a number of different ways to ensure nothing is missing when it comes to important health information for your doctor. This helps eliminate human error factor and ensure providers are addressing all possible issues while evaluating the correct aspects of a patient’s medical history for any red flags. These redundancies and other aspects of the questionnaires are also used to weed out anyone who may be trying to abuse the system or are providing untruthful information. Creating access to safe, high-quality care is our priority, and we take significant steps to ensure that people can’t “game” the platform to inappropriately obtain prescriptions.
Then, after all this, there are still two additional internal system checks that occur to ensure patient safety and prevent negative prescription interactions or inadvertent overprescribing.
Prescriptions
If a doctor decides a prescription is the best course of care for a Hims & Hers customer, the prescription is routed through SureScripts, the nation’s most trusted health information network for electronic prescribing. SureScripts again verifies the validity of the prescribing doctor and the prescription request through their extensive national network before any prescription is filled.
From there the prescription is routed to a third-party licensed pharmacy that works with Hims & Hers or to any other licensed pharmacy of the patient’s choice. Pharmacies that work with Hims & Hers must be fully licensed and comply with stringent regulations and standards in filling and dispensing medications.
Additional verifications of patient information and the prescriptions are also performed by the pharmacies, just as they would be in a traditional retail pharmacy setting. This includes a comprehensive review of the patient’s prescription and medication data before, during and after dispensing known as a Drug Utilization Review, as well as a filling accuracy check performed by the pharmacist to ensure the medication dispensed matches what was prescribed by the physician.
This multi-phase process of checking customer identity might seem over-the-top, but it’s critical to ensure we maintain only the highest standards of safety and efficacy for everyone on the Hims & Hers platforms. And of course, if a doctor believes they don’t have sufficient medical information about a patient to make an appropriate diagnosis, or the provider does not believe medication is the correct treatment course, then the doctor will not prescribe to the patient and instead discuss a different course of treatment.
In the rare case a duplicate prescription is detected, it’s immediately flagged, and the prescription is not filled while the best next steps are determined between the patient, doctor, and pharmacy.
Your Privacy
All patient data is maintained within our platform, and it’s encrypted both in transmission and at rest. The platform has security controls consistent with the standards established by HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HITRUST so you can rest assured we are working to protect your privacy from end to end on our platform.
Our Mission
The company was founded to make it easier to access quality affordable care. To take away stigma around medical care. To make it easier for you to be your best self. Because there’s nothing that should be embarrassing about feeling healthy.
At the end of the day, you should feel confident the doctors you’re connected with on the platform are committed to providing you with a top-quality standard of care. Period. These doctors put what’s in the best interest of patients ahead of everything else because that’s their job, it’s the oath they’ve taken to uphold, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
This article is written by Adrian Rawlinson, MD and VP Medical Affairs for Hims & Hers.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The information contained herein is not a substitute for and should never be relied upon for professional medical advice. Always talk to your doctor about the risks and benefits of any treatment.
