Britons are rightly proud of the NHS but as any busy professional will know, it is difficult to get an appointment with a GP that fits in with work hours. That’s where a new startup Push Doctor hopes to make a difference. Instead of having to register with a practice and then call up first thing in the morning hoping for a suitable time slot, patients can book a video conference with a GP at £19 for each ten-minute slot.
The idea, the app service claims, is gaining traction among young professionals who are not always registered with a surgery and appreciate the convenience of selecting a slot that suits them. Average waiting times can be a matter of minutes and prescriptions can be collected from a chemist of the customer’s choice following on from a consultation.
Founder and CEO, Eren Ozagir was on a business trip to Baltimore in his previous role as commercial and chief marketing officer at Music Magpie (old CDs for cash) when he came up with the idea. After being prompted by Uber to take a boat across the harbour, he later fell ill but had no idea how to “Uber a GP”.
“I was in my hotel feeling terrible and it just struck me, if you can get a car and even a taxi-boat through Uber, why isn’t there an app to get you speaking to a doctor?” he says.
But why would people pay £19 for a ten-minute consultation which would be free at their local GP surgery? Ozagir points out that walk-in centres have for several years been providing a service for people who want to fit in seeing a doctor around their busy work lives.
“A lot of people just don’t want to interact with a doctor in a way that older generations do,” he says. “They have an attitude that if they can bank, book a hotel, order a meal or an Uber taxi on their mobile, then why shouldn’t they be able to talk to a doctor through it, too. Anyone aged from 18 to 45, which is our core audience, wants to have things come to them, not the other way around.”
Soon after flying home from that Baltimore trip, Ozagir quit his job to set up Push Doctor. The first step was convincing insurers to extend the cover they were offering for doctors providing private consultations to include teleconferencing. It wasn’t a service any offered and took a few meetings to put in place, giving doctors the confidence to sign up.
Three years after launching, Ozagir now claims 7,000 registered GPs have signed up to the service, mostly providing consultations in their spare time.
Adam Simon, a Greater Manchester based GP working in a surgery, is one of them. “The service fits in with my day job, so I can plan short bursts of activity on the platform or plan around existing commitments,” he says.
“Usually, out-of-hours work involves travelling to a different surgery or doing home visits, but with Push Doctor I can work from home and treat many more people. I know from my day job that the vast majority of patients come in with a range of everyday ailments or issues that they are facing, but most of these can be treated remotely.” He says that he has seen patients around the country, treating anything “from fairly common complaints, like infections and digestive disorders, to mental health issues and more complex individual cases”.
While Ozagir is guarded over patient numbers, he does say that thousands of appointment hours have been booked and fulfilled. But the obvious drawback of the service is that videoconferencing doesn’t allow a doctor to physically touch a patient – and the GP concerned is unlikely to have access to the patient’s records. Ozagir claims that a video link still allows a doctor to see the patient and ask them to move so they can, for example, check how free movement of a joint is progressing. In time, he predicts, systems will allow for all records to be accessed so a GP will be able to read detailed medical notes.
This is a factor which venture capitalist, Ed Stacey, managing director at IQ Capital Partners, believes will make or break the service.
“Its biggest challenge is getting access to national health data on patients because without this it is reliant on accurate patient reports,” he says. “However, there’s a really great opportunity to combine this service with health data from wearable devices and apps to give doctors heart rate and galvanic skin response, which can indicate stress, body temperature and breathing.” Stacey adds that the app could also combine this with data on exercise or inactivity, as well as tap into more specialised consumer devices such as wearable glucose monitors.
Push Doctor closed a round of financing with venture capitalists in January which brought in $8.2m (£6.2m), taking the amount raised to date to $9.4m (£7.1m). Meanwhile, Ozagir acknowledges data-centric services is a clear direction for it to take. He also says that one of the biggest surprises around Push Doctor is how it is used proactively by young people to discuss diet and fitness plans. Rather than being solely a place to discuss aches and rashes, he claims the service is helping users to plan healthier lifestyles. That would suggest wearables data is an avenue Push Doctor is currently exploring extensively, ahead of a new service offering to be launched before the end of the year.
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