To John Sung Kim, the natural evolution of mHealth would give every physician his or her own iPhone app.
That, in a nutshell, is what Kim's company, DoctorBase.com, is doing.
The San Francisco-based company, which launched in 2010, markets what its founders call the "mHealth-as-a-service" platform, which enables physicians to offer patients a secure smartphone connection for quick, personalized mHealth visits. Kim, the company's CEO, sees the service as an opportunity for physicians to forgo the often-ineffective patient portal and monetize their e-mails.
"Mobile is changing everything," he said in a recent press release. "Now that health systems are starting to wake up to the benefits of cloud computing and the Internet, they're so late to the party that it's no longer about that paradigm – patients across all demographics now use smartphones as their primary connectivity device. That's leaving both doctors and patients communicating with each other in non-HIPAA compliant, unsecured ways such as email and text for the simple sake of convenience."
Kim, a virtual call center entrepreneur who founded Five9 and 6connect, believes the app marketplace is nearing its saturation point, and that healthcare providers now must move beyond that initial stage and find ways to make the app more than just another representation of a website or portal. To physicians, their office managers and their patients, that means a simple mobile communications tool that enables doctor and patient to exchange basic information.
"mHealth is so new – everyone's frame of reference is the e-mail," he said in a recent interview. "It's that ability to communicate with one's existing doctor … that doctors and their patients both want, but can't seem to find. "
Kim said DoctorBase was established as a platform by which doctors could gain reimbursement for their e-mails; with that in mind, the company set the platform so that doctors would have to charge at least 99 cents per message. Now, with more than 9,000 healthcare providers and 3 million patients using the platform, the company is rolling out a free version of its platform, so that physicians can set up their own system.
One Dallas-based physician, who used his Facebook identity of James Londyn rather than his real name, said DoctorBase enables him and his patients to avoid what might otherwise be unnecessary and expensive medical consultations.
"I just had a patient message me with a picture through DoctorBase. She was going to take her son to the ER and I quickly saw that it was not a medical emergency and was able to message her back quickly while she was on the go," Londyn said in the press release issued by DoctorBase. "We just saved the system $1,500 and this is the kind of efficiency we should be seeking to expand."
Kim sees DoctorBase not as a concierge service, but as a hybrid platform that enables solo doctors and those in small practices to communicate better with their patients. Too many are relying on inefficient portals, he said, or having apps designed "by a clever nephew who isn't even sure what HIPAA stands for."
"Patients want convenience more than they want privacy, and doctors want compensation for their time or to be a market differentiator," he said. "What we're doing is very simple. Not everyone uses patient portals, but everyone has a smartphone."
