The Doctor is in Your Smartphone
- Posted by stratchi
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What happens when you start to get sick? You can do a quick Web MD search and find out you might have cancer. Or you go the doctor’s office and wait for an hour before finally seeing a doctor. Well there are now companies out there that are trying to put a stop to that, via your smartphone. Both HealthTap and First Opinion are two apps that are striving to bring personal healthcare into your pocket.
First Opinion
First Opinion is an app that connects users with real doctors around the world. To use the app, a person logs in, gives their age and gender and are then matched with a doctor. The user is presented with a brief bio of the doctor, including their specialty, how long they’ve been practicing, where they’re located, peer reviews and how many questions they’ve answered on the app so far. It also includes some personal details, such as if they have children. In the free version of the service, answers from the doctor could take up to 24 hours. For those looking for quicker answers, $9 a month gets you an answer within five minutes. And for $29 a month, it goes down to just three minutes. First Opnion is only available on iOS.
HealthTap
HealthTap is a service taking it a little bit further, as a complete Interactive Health Network working to improve a people’s health and well-being. The service started as a place for members to ask questions and get answers from doctors, view wellness lists and get reminders. But wanting to focus more on getting people to feel better sooner, they’ve redesigned the service. The new service is more of a complete mobile health concierge, with new features including virtual, mobile doctor visits and pharmacy integration to process prescriptions. For basic information, HealthTap is free on both iPhone and Android. But for access to personalized doctor advice and virtual visits, HealthTap costs $99 per person per month and an extra $10 for each addition family member.