It seems like a team of Finns decided their single-payer healthcare system wasn’t enough of a challenge, so they moved to Silicon Valley to bring order to helping people find new doctors. BetterDoctor’s birth story actually comes from co-founder Ari Tulla’s personal experience trying to find the right doctor for his family, and has spawned a web and mobile service to help people find the right doctor in America’s complicated medical system. We covered their “beta” Silicon Valley launch last May, but yesterday they have launched nationwide covering 600 000 doctors from Primary Care to Dentists and Optometrists.
It’s not an easy problem to tackle – BetterDoctor has been working on this solution for the last 18 months. There are around 1,500 different insurance plans in the U.S., and a complicated dataset on doctors to compile. But in this complexity there is a market opportunity. Each year over 70 million Americans look for a new doctor because they move, change jobs, or change health insurance plans.
While people want the best care they can get, but most importantly they want a doctor that is both accepting patients and someone their insurance company will pay for. On BetterDoctor you can search for doctors based on your insurance plan, then find if they’re accepting patients, read ratings, or call the doctor within the app. By doing so, they’re providing a much easier solution than digging through your insurance company’s website, trying to find online ratings, and then finally call to find out they’re booked.
The service verifies doctors to give a baseline quality standard. They verify medical licenses, malpractice and discipline records, experience and education, and affiliated hospitals. BetterDoctor also plugs into consumer ratings, such as Yelp, to help you find others’ experience with their care.
Yelp and Angie’s List reviews have brought more information to finding a new doctor (compared to asking friends and neighbors), but they only go so far. It will be interesting to see how BetterDoctor grows with their nationwide launch.
