Doctor discovery and consultation platform Lybrate has launched GoodMD, a networking platform exclusively for doctors to voice their opinions on regulatory and administrative issues in healthcare. The company said it came up with GoodMD since due to a lack of an online space where medical professionals could talk to each other.
Lybrate claims that GoodMD has allowed doctors to talk about issues like the National Medical Council Bill and Bridge Course, which has been a controversial issue in the medical community.
The GoodMD claims to have 70,000 doctors across specialties.
Registration and news feeds
MediaNama was able to create an account with GoodMD, and although we were asked for qualification proof, registration proof, and a government issued photo ID, there was an option to continue without the documents. An abridged or incomplete version of the platform is offered without the documents. Doctors’ posts cannot be viewed fully and neither could we post anything.
GoodMD offers a ‘Feed’ where there are doctors’ posts about patients, health conditions, and hospitals. While signing up, a user is asked for city of practice, stream (allopathy / AYUSH / veterinary / undergraduate student), and specialty of practice. The feed appears to be curated accordingly since we saw posts from general surgeons – what we signed up as while creating an account. We were unable to access MedShorts, which presumably is a 360-word micro-blogging platform within GoodMD.
Content policy?
The GoodMD feed had posts by doctors talking about patients’ medical conditions, their cases, some posts seeking medical advice, and so on. We did not see any personally identifiable information, but it would most definitely be interesting to look at the platform’s content policies, especially since medical information is sensitive data. At present, GoodMD is a section on Lybrate, and we assume Lybrate’s content policy would apply, but we have reached out to the company for further details.
Lybrate was founded in 2014, and offers online consultation with doctors. It also offers a lab service and offers sample pick-ups. It claims to have 150,000 doctors and ‘health experts’ and raised $10.2 million in July 2015.
