Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I am talking about doctors helping in that engagement process. I think doctors have the issue of prescribing something to the patient, but the patient doesn’t do what has been prescribed. Then the doctor can’t help.

Dan Hickey: That is right. I heard an example the other day where a doctor said, “When the patient leaves, I ask all my patient to give me a call back, and I give them my cellphone number. Let me know how it is going after three or four days.” The patients are excited to get the doctor’s phone number. When somebody asks the doctor at this conference “Do you actually talk to all your patients after three or four days?” he says, “No, I never answer the phone. They can leave me a message and I generally know it is going OK.”

I think the problem with doctors is they just don’t have the bandwidth. I don’t know how many patients they see per day, maybe 50 or 60. Where do they get the bandwidth to call and follow up with each of those patients? We think that it is part of their attempt, but the way we are looking at it is that our platform could be leveraged by both a provider – like a doctor’s office – there is a way of maintaining a sustained relationship with the consumer. Where a doctor might not talk to you, I might have 50 people who could talk to you about their experiences with their doctors. I think it is a challenge to answer your question directly. I don’t think doctors have bandwidth to engage in meaningful relationships with the hundreds of patients they see on a weekly basis.

SM: So, you are saying the doctor doesn’t have a role to play. Let me suggest that if the doctors were pushing your kind of applications and you created a way for the doctors to participate in creating that engagement, that would actually enhance the experience.

DH: Let me follow up on your suggestion, which is a good one. I agree with that. What we want to do is ultimately build a service-based architecture, where I can have all kinds of services, including appointment services or services that take some primary data. Let’s say we ask a patient every day when he or she shows up, “How are you doing? How motivated are you? Give me your A1c level.” In the future I can ultimately see the building of a service that would allow that patient to release that data, so I can ping and share that with the doctor, based on what is happening on our community platform. We would also love to build a service where the doctor can communicate directly with the patients on our platform.

SM: If it is a pure peer-to-peer or pure consumer-to-consumer environment without any supervision or participation from the caregivers, there is a big opportunity being missed.

DH: I agree with you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health
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