*Moses Hohman
CEO and Co-founder, Human Practice
Oral Presentation – Business Track
Saturday, Sept 29, 2012: 3:43 PM – 4:03PM – LK130
Human Practice (http://humanpractice.com) helps patients and doctors find healthcare professionals through trusted networks. Networking–finding and asking people that know “who’s good”–is already the primary way physicians find doctors and other healthcare practitioners for themselves, their families, their friends and their patients. Today this networking is primarily done offline, by phone or in person, or using general-purpose online tools like email. As a result, physicians are often confronted with a networking challenge to provide a recommendation outside their specialty and/or geographical sphere of expertise.
The most common way patients find doctors is also word of mouth, whether asking friends and family or getting a referral from their existing physician (Tu and Lauer, Res Briefs, 2008). But there are gaps here, too. Unless patients have access to a trusted online community (e.g. moms group, disease community, etc.), they ask only a handful of people for a recommendation. Even when they have access to a large network, the recommendations they receive most often come from a patient perspective (bedside manner, communication skills, office efficiency and professionalism, etc.). This perspective is important and valuable, but patients today have little access to how a recommended physician’s medical or surgical skill is regarded by those who know best.
Social network sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have revealed that our personal and professional networks are much larger than we realize. By leveraging and augmenting these existing networks, Human Practice enables physicians, and for the first time the general public to reach out far more effectively to find the right healthcare professionals.
We will present an interactive demo of the Human Practice web and mobile applications, including the following features:
- guided networking
- anonymous networking
- social recommendation features
- rich, patient-perspective content on physicians
- helping the hubs of the recommendation network spread the word privately and securely through a mobile application
