In this document:1. A summary of HealthTap’s company profile2. My personal commentary on my experience using HealthTap for 2 weeks

HealthTap Profile

Funding Received: $38.3 million in 5 rounds from 13 investors

Most Recent Funding: $24 million on May 8, 2013

● HealthTap does not pay doctors to answer the thousands of general questions that users have posted online. User's may ask any number of short questions if they sign up for the free "Basic" service. HealthTap has rolled out two paid services, however.

Other Products:

RateRX: The first independent resource enabling doctors to weigh in on a large scale evaluation of medications for treatments for free on a smartphone. The startup has compiled thousands of doctor-rated drugs and added them to the RateRX database. Currently, doctors review medication treatments for conditions like acne, arthiritis, anxiety, and headaches. It provides recommendations and insight from pharmacists for a fee.

HealthTap Prime: It allows users to submit their own medical information as part of a HealthTap medical record and then request video-conference consultations with HealthTap physicians. The physicians must document their interaction and can prescribe medications to the patients’ local pharmacies (but not those with higher abuse potential).

HealthTap Concierge: It’s the latest service rolled out by HealthTap. It encourages doctors to perform one-on-one video conferences with "established" patients. This is aimed to draw in patients that might know a doctor from their private practice, but HealthTap serves as a medium for which they can get advice without an office visit.

Patients must pay monthly premiums for the Prime and Concierge services. For the Concierge service, the physicians are paid $30 by HealthTap for each consultation, regardless of its duration. They can choose whether to accept this payment or donate some percentage or all to charity service. They are required to set "office hours" during which time they will be logged in at their computer and available, whether or not there are actually any patient consults scheduled.

Health Tap Registration Process

Left Screenshot: I liked how they showed me a list of benefits of signing up for HealthTap before I decided to sign up. The nice display of all those big media companies reassured me that HealthTap is a reliable company that actually does all the things it promises. Middle Screenshot: The layout of the explanation of the ways that HealthTap can be useful for me was appealing and it gave me a feeling of “I’m glad I’m signing up because all of these benefits seem pretty helpful” I didn’t find it annoying that they showed me the same info twice in a row, because each benefit was presented in a more specific way than before. I found that being reassured of all the benefits I would receive made me more excited to continue the registration process.Right Screenshot: I had some issues trying to edit the message I wanted to send to the doctor available. The cursor was moving outside of the message box and wouldn’t let me scroll back to the beginning of the sentence I wanted to edit.

Left Screenshot: These are some topics that I chose in order to customize what kind of doctor’s advice I wanted to show up on my newsfeed. I like this feature because even though these topics don’t correspond to the knee pain that made me use HealthTap in the first place, I didn’t realize I wanted to learn more about some of these topics before HealthTap asked me about it. I’ve been using the app a lot more to check my newsfeed to read up on these topics instead of just using it to follow up with my doctors about my private consultations. Middle Screenshot: The doctor I initially selected to send my message to was not licensed to see patients in California. Since I already input where I was located, I was annoyed that they didn’t use that info to filter the doctors listed so that I would only see doctors licensed to see patients in California. Right Screenshot: I didn’t understand why I had to be “accepted” as a patient. All of the personal info I was just asked to give should have already filtered which doctors would and wouldn’t be able to help me. It also indicates that I have to schedule a video chat appointment with the Dr. Rutledge. It already seems like it’s going to be a while until I get to speak with a doctor.

Left Screenshot: I received this welcome email shortly after registering. When I tried to complete my profile, it led me to the same questions (birth date, name, location, gender) that I’d already filled out. There were actually no new bits of info that I could input to complete my profile. This was a pointless email and annoying. It wasn’t until I went into the mobile app where I saw the extra info that I hadn’t completed in my profile. Middle Screenshot: While navigating through the app, I was prompted with this offer. I didn’t know that this was available until after I’d already paid for a message to be sent to a doctor. Why didn’t they offer me this discount price for an immediate consultation first before encouraging me to pay full price to send a typed message to a doctor who would get back to me “soon”? More confusion! Right Screenshot: I decided to use the one-time offer to use their prime service to video chat with a doctor. After selecting this option, I was told to wait 2 minutes while they connected me with a doctor. The 2 min estimation was very accurate; the doctor connected with me right away.

Left Screenshot: The doctor I talked to over video chat sent me this summary of our conversation. I received this report as a link in an email that took me to the report in my mobile app. Middle Screenshot: I was given a checklist of actions that I should take to solve my knee injury. I found this feature very helpful because if I hadn’t been taking notes during our conversation, I might have forgotten the doctor’s advice. Right Screenshot: After my consultation, I rated my doctor very highly. Dr. Sial was very sympathetic and patient with me. He recommended that I get a physical evaluation from a sports medicine doctor to get a proper diagnosis. He explained what he thought the physical condition of my knee was and what he thought was the cause of the injury. I found it interesting that he wasn’t dressed in professional clothing. I didn’t find the video chat format awkward at all, instead, it turned out to be especially helpful. After he answering all my questions about my knee, he even offered me advice on a splinter that I currently have in my finger and that I believe may be infected. I was able to hold up my finger to the camera so that he could inspect the redness surrounding the splinter and he could give me advice on how to remove it. He also used certain gestures with his hands to simulate what most likely happened to my knee while playing volleyball that caused the injury. This was very helpful for me to navigate around all of the anatomical terms he was using and to better understand my injury. This wouldn’t have been possible over voice chat or text, so I was happy with my choice to use video chat.

Left Screenshot: I received 14 other emails identical to this one telling me that a new doctor had been added to my Care Team. I would’ve much rather received this info through a notification system in the app on my phone than through email since I got so many. It got pretty annoying. Middle and Right Screenshot: I signed up for this free trial of the upgraded version of a HealthTap membership. I plan to keep testing out the features with this slightly different version of HealthTap.