Why I’m a Healthcare Entrepreneur

I just wrote this on a website that asked me why I wanted to do this. It all came out in a single five-minutes of typing into a tiny web-form box. That makes me think it’s real. Here’s what I wrote:

Several years ago I suffered some odd symptoms. The HMO doctor did a little bloodwork and dismissed them. I paid out of pocket for specialists who did expensive tests and found nothing amiss. It wasn’t until I found a doctor who had seen cases like mine before that I got a diagnosis and got better. I want to help others find the right doctor faster than I did.

Doctor shopping is a huge cost on our healthcare system but it happens for a reason: many doctors are the wrong fit for their patients. I want to solve this problem by matching patients and doctors so people get better faster. The broad implementation of the EMR gives us the golden opportunity to make this happen now. The data we need is no longer trapped in manila folders in metal filing cabinets. It’s now within our reach. We can actually see which doctor has the right experience for which patient.

I’ve spent 14 years building web applications with my own team for other people. Now I’m building one for me — and everyone like me who hasn’t yet found the right doctor for them.

Sadly, the medical system has treated doctors like commodities, like they’re all the same product which can be rated and priced on a single scale of 1-5 the way we rate crude oil on its sulfur content. That’s bogus. There is no “one best doctor” for all. It’s a multi-dimensional problem of matching not rating. The challenge here is mass personalization not mass marketing.

Health, wealth, and wisdom. When you have a health problem you realize health matters most. Now that I have my health I can refocus on wealth. I believe that solving the doctor-patient matching problem will yield massive benefits which will be quickly sought-after in the current healthcare climate. The one who gets this right will help millions — and make millions, too. I intend to be that guy.