• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Uncategorized

HealthTap Launches Killer Update

September 26, 2011 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

One of the biggest challenges facing health care communication is the silos that we create.  Doctors have spaces where they can talk to doctors.  Patients easily connect with one another.  But no one seems to be thinking about how we can get doctors and patients together.  HealthTap may offer a solution.

HealthTap is an interactive health network centered around a rapidly growing database of health information driven by patient questions.  In a nutshell:  Patients ask questions.  Physicians answer the questions.  The answers are compiled, referenced and accessed through a robust search engine or through the profile pages of member physicians who responded.  HealthTap serves patients with reliable health information.  Doctors get a place where they can store those hundreds of questions that they are asked repeatedly.

The site has been in beta with pediatricians and OBs since its quiet launch 5 months ago.  Today HealthTap is going big by opening its enrollment to all medical specialties.  And based on the early input of nearly 5,000 physicians, HealthTap has been updated with some features worth mentioning:

Peer review.  With today’s release the engineers at HealthTap have added some peer review features which will help give great questions more weight in the HealthTap environment.  If a physician finds another physicians answer to a question reliable, they can ‘Agree’ with the other physician’s response.  Or, they can simply choose to answer the question in a different way.  If a patient finds a question that helps them, they can ‘Thank’ the doctor who answered.  The ‘Agree’ and ‘Thank you’ features help participating physicians and their answers establish authority in the HealthTap community.

HealthTap Express.  HealthTap is now offering a mobile product that puts knowledge directly in the hands of participating consumers and physicians.  I’ve had the chance to play with Express.  What so striking about the application is the simplicity of the interface and the speed at which it references the HealthTap knowledge base.  If for no other reason, register with HealthTap, get the app and see how a clean, fast tool can put doctors and patients on the same page.

Focus on local.  While the world may be flat, patients and the doctors who care for them are hyperlocal.  Healthtap’s latest release will allow participating doctors to be notified of questions coming from local patients.  So any physician interested in visibility in their local market will have an incentive to answer questions quickly.  This is a really interesting concept and I’m curious to see how this feature evolves.

I had the opportunity to tour HealthTap’s Palo Alto headquarters during Medicine 2.0 last week and the energy coming from their team of informatics experts and engineers was amazing.  Should they maintain their vision of bridging the doctor-patient silo this platform has potential that goes well beyond Q&A.  HealthTap is the brainchild of Silicon Valley’s smiling health connector, Ron Gutman.

HealthTap is powered by doctors and patients so to make it buzz go on over to HealthTap and register.  And feel free to ask me questions!

Related Articles

  • SXSW 2011 and Health
  • Doctors, Patients and Boundaries
  • The Eye and Voice of the Public Physician

Related Articles

  • SXSW 2011 and Health
  • Doctors, Patients and Boundaries
  • The Eye and Voice of the Public Physician

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

Reactive and Creative Spaces

The Rise of Medicine’s Creative Class

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy