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January 13, 2007

Has any body done anything like Patient Opinion before?

Nope! Dont think so. And we did not hear of anything like us when we led a seminar for the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit last year. But there are quite a lot of American sites that look as though they do the same. For example Revolution Health and RateMD.com both look good and allow you to rate your own personal doctor. But on scratching deeper I could only find positive ratings. Perhaps not surprising given that:
a. both sites are driven by advertising
b. the litiginous nature of US medical practice.

They are surely ambitious though. Revolution Health was founded by Steve Case the ex Chief Executive of AOL who in a related blog is reported as saying he wants the site to be the site where US health consumers can go for everything - comparative outcomes data, health advice about every condition and procedure, and how to compare different health insurance packages. Hard to tell if it will work since the site is still under beta-testing.

We have always thought that the business model underlying our kind of site was really important. There are just so many competing interests (and of course we have our share too) that its all too easy for the needs of the business to drive and distort the site content. After a lot of thought we came to the conlcusion that if there was a sweet spot that managed these conflicts to everyone's advantage and that promoted transparency, it was as a social enterprise driven by subscriptions from organisations about whom the comments are made.
At first glance this looks just as conflicted as any other model. But by giving RSS feeds to other organisations (local commissioners, Scrutiny Committees, national patient groups etc) the voice of the patient on the site is leveraged into something that providers just can't ignore. If there are comments about an opinion from your local commissioners, a patient group and the MP, then suddenly subscribing begins to make sense.

Posted by Paul at January 13, 2007 4:02 PM