February 3, 2010, 5:45 pm
Have a Medical Question? Text a Group of Doctors
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Patients, journalists, financial analysts, pharmaceutical executives and doctors could at times benefit from having a panel of physicians to whom they could pose questions. Truth On Call, a San Francisco start-up, assembles such a group virtually, by letting people text questions to physicians and then collecting the doctors’ responses.
The paid service, rolled out in January, is now open to members of the media, health care industry and financial firms. Truth On Call plans to offer the service to patients in a few months and, later on, to caregivers in developing countries who are seeking advice from doctors in the United States.
Those asking questions pay a minimum of $50 to ask one question of one doctor, though at this point it is only open to those who want to pose questions to large groups, because of the cost to the company.
Truth On Call taps into the phenomenon that differentiates Twitter from other online communication tools — the ability to ask a question of a broad, unknown audience and see what comes back. Some doctors, for example, have used Twitter to pose questions about a perplexing case and get responses from doctors they do not know.
“Information is being exchanged very, very quickly in people’s personal and professional lives, but health care has yet to tap into the feed,” said Rosina Samadani, who founded the company. “This is a way for folks to get answers from thousands of physicians within minutes or hours.”
Dr. Samadani — who has been a health care consultant for 12 years at McKinsey and Capella Advisors, a firm she started — hopes to eventually use Truth On Call to connect doctors in developing countries with those in the United States. Someone in rural India, for example, could get real-time advice about a patient from a group of doctors in the United States.
Doctors sign up to participate at Truth On Call’s Web site. The company verifies that the physician is registered with the federal database of doctors who can prescribe medicine and verifies identity by sending a text message to his or her cellphone. Doctors receive $10 for each question they answer, and Truth On Call will send the checks to their address or to a charity of their choosing.
Reporters have asked doctors about their views on the health care bill, for example, or queried neurosurgeons on whether they limit their own cellphone usage because of concern about effects on the brain.
A pharmaceutical company has asked gynecologists whether a competitor’s ad has affected which birth control pill they prescribe, and a financial firm considering an acquisition of a company that makes a gastroparesis drug asked intensive care doctors how pressing an issue gastroparesis was.
The fees for asking questions can quickly add up. Texting 100 doctors with a 24-hour response time costs $5,000, covering the doctors’ $10 fees plus text-messaging fees and payment to Truth On Call.
That might work for big companies, but it could make the service prohibitively expensive for patients to use, unless they ask questions of just a few doctors. Other tech start-ups have developed less expensive ways for patients to see doctors virtually. For example, American Well and UnitedHealth Group’s OptumHealth division offer 10-minute, one-on-one doctor visits over video chat for $45.
