Featured Startup Pitch: DoctorBase is pioneering ‘mobile health-as-a-service’ with the goal of making it easy for doctors to move into the mobile age

By Zachary Landman, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, DoctorBase

Elevator Pitch: DoctorBase allows any sized medical practice or physician group to leverage the benefits of mobile communication and marketing without millions in capital investment or exhaustive IT support.

Product/Service Description

DoctorBase provides mobile health-as-a-service, meaning that for a small monthly fee we provide the look, feel, and capabilities beyond that of multi-million dollar healthcare conglomerates such as Kaiser, Mayo Clinic, or One Medical. It all starts with the creation of a physician profile that, through its SEO-friendly design, trusted Google Star Ranking, and connection to 12,000 DoctorBase providers, ranks at or near the very top of Google, Google Local, and Google Mobile search results, allowing patients to easily find and access new and existing providers from any device. Without requiring any software or mobile app downloads, these profiles act like a modern healthcare app, allowing patients to securely message their doctor, contact the back office, schedule an appointment, write in their health journal, or share their healthcare experience via social media or a trusted review. As patients register, they also gain access to a wealth of information, allowing them to freely ask anonymous questions of thousands of providers, from dermatologists to orthopedic surgeons. Through these patient engagement features and their integration into both social media sites and Google reviews, DoctorBase physicians find themselves rapidly expanding their practices, and spending considerably less time returning voicemails and lamenting missed or cancelled appointments.

Founders’ Story

DoctorBase was co-founded by John Sung Kim, CEO, and Mischa Spiegelmock, CTO, in April, 2010. Kim’s previous experience as founder of Five9, the industry leader in cloud-based virtual call center software, and as co-founder of 6connect, an enterprise software company, inspired him to rethink the existing paradigm of antiquated healthcare communication. Partnering with Spiegelmock, who helped develop large-scale blogging at LiveJournal, they set out to create the first mobile platform for patient-physician communication.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Patients and physicians alike know that our current model for healthcare delivery is broken. Providers are being forced to work harder and longer to maintain pace, and patients are frustrated that their physician is too busy to communicate outside of a nine minute appointment anymore. DoctorBase’s mobile platform has demonstrated to over 12,000 doctors and nearly five million patients that ‘going mobile’ saves time, generates new revenue, and leaves patients happy and satisfied. In concrete terms, our doctors on average save 40 minutes per day (totaling 3.5 hours per week), generate $47,000 in increased revenue through online referrals, appointments, and premium features, and proudly display a 4.5 star rating.

Market Opportunity

With Americans visiting the doctor more than one billion times last year alone, it is no surprise that mobile health is estimated to be at least a $12 billion dollar market and is poised to explode. Patients are not only excited at the prospect of engaging their healthcare through their mobile device, they are starting to demand it. Nearly double the amount of people are accessing and downloading mobile healthcare products this year compared to last (247 million in 2012 alone!) and physicians are just now beginning to appreciate the full role that mobile devices can assume. Three years ago, hardly any physicians used mobile apps, whereas now 80 percent report using mobile tools in their daily practice and 88 percent want to collect more data from their patients remotely. As the industry’s leader in providing mobile health platforms, DoctorBase is well positioned to capitalize on the growing market.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

DoctorBase provides the only HIPAA-Omnibus compliant social platform for doctor-patient communications and is the only one to generate new revenue for doctors. DoctorBase’s mobile platform goes beyond secure messaging to define a new era of mobile marketing communications that allows doctors to leverage their secure messages and reviews to generate referral networks through Facebook and Google.

Business Model

DoctorBase provides its mobile platform as a fully-supported service that includes 24/7 customer support, full back office training, and EMR integration without requiring a single dime of capital investment or IT support. Since the software is customizable and scalable, our customers range from individual practitioners to physician networks and accountable care organizations.

Current Needs

We’ve been able to largely bootstrap our entire way, allowing us to keep our company’s and our employees’ goals aligned. Fortunately, we’re now to the point where we’re generating sufficient revenue to accelerate our expansion.

We’re currently on the lookout for talented and creative engineers to help build something they’ll love and now, specifically, we’re looking for a Chief Financial Officer to help coordinate our accelerating growth.

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Website: www.doctorbase.com