HealthTap

“On the internet,” says Ron Gutman, “every headache becomes a brain tumor in four clicks or less.”

For Gutman and his colleagues in the world of health tech, this has become a running joke, a cheeky nod to just how far the human imagination can wander after a quick search of benign symptoms. But there’s more than a little truth to it. The fact is: the sheer abundance of health information online makes consulting Dr. Google an altogether flawed—and at times terrifying—first step toward getting better.

Ron Gutman. Alex Washburn/WIRED

So, in 2010, Gutman launched HealthTap, an online service that makes it just as easy to get answers to your health questions from a real, trusted doctor. The company started as a kind of beefed-up question-and-answer site, where users can get free responses to their medical queries from thousands of peer-reviewed doctors, and it grew exponentially, serving over 100 million people with some 1.9 billion doctor answers after just a few years.Now, Gutman is taking things one step further. On Wednesday, his company announced the launch of HealthTap Prime, a new service that gives subscribers unlimited access to live videoconferences with actual doctors for $99 a month, plus $10 for every additional family member.

With Prime, HealthTap is feeding the rapidly growing demand for telemedicine services. According to the research firm IHS, revenue from companies entering this space is expected to grow to $1.9 billion in 2018, a huge leap from the $240 million the industry made in 2013. That’s driven in part by the Affordable Care Act, which champions the use of telehealth technologies in an effort to drive down Medicare and Medicaid costs and improve patient outcomes.

It’s also a reaction to the growing awareness that many patients are wasting their money on costly and unnecessary tests and doctor visits. One 2009 study by Thomson Reuters found that “unnecessary care”—including unnecessary tests meant to safeguard providers from liability—accounted for $250 billion to $325 billion in annual healthcare spending.

HealthTap

While telemedicine may never replace traditional in-person care, it does hold the promise of reducing such extraneous doctor visits, making care less costly and more convenient for both the patient and the provider. And as wearable devices and other at-home monitoring tools become more sophisticated, the scope of care that can be delivered virtually will only expand.Several companies are already going after a piece of this massive pie. American Well and Teladoc have begun partnering with insurance companies to offer subscribers telemedicine services as an added benefit in their coverage, and others, like Doctors on Demand, backed by television’s Dr. Phil McGraw, are targeting patients first. Because the field is so new, says Forrester analyst Peter Mueller, there’s still ample room for competition in the space. “I don’t think anyone’s got a lock on the market,” says Mueller, who focuses on health technology. “People are still playing around with models, and this is definitely an interesting one.”

More Than a Video Conferencing Tool

But for Gutman, HealthTap is the only company addressing patient needs from the moment they have a question about a symptom to the virtual consultation and, if necessary, all the way through to diagnosis and prescription. That means with Prime, HealthTap is simultaneously taking on giants like WebMD, major insurers with their own telemedicine programs, and the established healthcare system as we know it. “A lot of people who are starting to do telemedicine services take Skype, put it in a wrapper, have doctors here, patients there, put it in the app store, and they’re done,” he says. “That’s not healthcare. That’s a feature.”

In designing the app, Gutman and his team wanted to make Prime more than just a video conferencing tool. Anyone can access HealthTap’s free database of doctor answers, but only Prime subscribers can pose follow up questions, visible only to them and the community of doctors. HealthTap also creates a personalized feed for Prime users. Similar to Facebook’s News Feed, it generates doctor answers users might be interested in and doctor-approved articles that might pertain to them, based on each user’s personal health records.