It doesn’t come as a surprise how the healthcare industry is thriving with new alternatives and techniques to offer the best care possible. One of the alternatives that has been around and proved to be feasible since last few months, is Telemedicine. Telemedicine holds the potential to change the world by making it easier and more affordable for healthcare providers to care for their patients anywhere, including rural and underserved areas. Everyone should have access to care through telemedicine, believes a leading-edge healthcare platform, Doxy.me. The company is not only of the belief, but is also changing the perspective of telemedicine being expensive and complicated by making it simple and free.
A strong doctor-patient relationship is the foundation for high-quality patient care and reducing health care costs. Doxy.me provides a simple and convenient way for healthcare providers to meet with their patients remotely, improving the health care experience.
A Simple, Free & Secure Platform
Doxy.me is on a mission to provide telemedicine for all who want/need it. It was started in 2013 to address the need for a simple, free, secure telemedicine platform for prenatal consultations with expecting mothers. Over the years, the platform had steady organic growth until March of this year when its signups started to increase dramatically, coinciding with the rise in COVID-19 cases around the world. There was obviously an urgent need for doctors to meet with their patients, and those patients were, in most cases, asked to remain in their homes. The company was honored to be able to provide a much-needed service during a global health emergency.
Since then, telemedicine has been on top-of-mind for many users, for its convenience and simplicity. The company understands that incorporating telemedicine into routine healthcare will encourage many consumers to stay in closer touch with their providers, and enable those providers to better nurture their patients.
In general, doxy.me is a free, HIPAA-compliant, secure telemedicine solution that provides a simple, convenient way for healthcare providers to meet with their patients remotely. It was designed to be easy; there is nothing to install and patients don’t need to create accounts. It even feels familiar, because the company has incorporated standard clinical workflows such as patient check-in and waiting room into the design.
Making telemedicine accessible means that more patients will reach out to their healthcare providers instead of hesitating due to safety or convenience factors.
The Creator Behind the Creation
The inceptive mind behind doxy.me is Brandon M. Welch. Brandon, MS, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics at the Medical University of South Carolina and an adjunct at Clemson University. He created doxy.me in 2013 as a student at the University of Utah when he needed a simple and inexpensive telemedicine solution for a clinical research study, and found none available. In addition to doxy.me, Brandon also created three other healthcare IT products, Dokbot.io and ItRunsInMyFamily.com, and Adhere.ly.
Brandon attended the University of Utah as an undergraduate, Tulane University School of Medicine for an M.S. in Human Genetics and the University of Utah School of Medicine for his Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics. He currently lives in Charleston, SC.
From Regulatory Issues to Convenient Platform
During initial stages, it was difficult for the company to convince early customers that the platform really was as simple to use as it is currently. Customers kept expecting that they would be required to download or maintain an app. Little did they know that through this platform, all they need to start a telemedicine visit is click a web link to the doctor’s doxy.me room using a standard computer. No other hardware or software is required.
Secondly, there were also a lot of regulatory issues that the company had to overcome in order to be a secure, HIPAA-compliant platform. It knew that without these two aspects, it wouldn’t be able to deliver the tool that healthcare professionals needed.
From thereon, doxy.me’s relevance has only increased and will continue to increase as both consumers and healthcare providers realize that not only is telemedicine accessible and simple, it’s dramatically more convenient than traveling to an appointment and traveling home. In July, the company hosted more than 11 million telemedicine sessions. That’s more than 11 million medical appointments that took place in a safe and convenient environment.
Brandon asserts, “The telemedicine space in general has exploded over the past six months. At the start of the pandemic, many providers turned to tools like Zoom or FaceTime because consumers were familiar with those tools, and there was obviously an urgent need. Many providers, though, had heard of doxy.me through peers, co-workers or industry publications, so they turned to us with increasing frequency. While there are more and more players in this field every day, we are still the secure, simple choice of many providers. We’re happy to say that we have nearly 750,000 users at this time.”
Customer-Centric Approach
Doxy.me has always focused on the customer experience. Its efforts in this area are obvious with every login to its platform, and the company always makes that a priority. When there are so many other competitors in a marketplace, businesses have to have a differentiating factor in order to compete and succeed.
The company always loves to hear from its users when they say how easy it is to use doxy.me, how comfortable it is, how intuitive it is, and how effortless it is. Even people who have never used telemedicine before are having similar experiences.
An excellent customer experience will always be the company’s goal. It wants to make telemedicine so effortless that more patients will use it. “Telemedicine will be the new normal, once COVID-19 is behind us, not only as the tool of choice for emergent situations, but as a front-line tool. Doctors can see patients, hospitals can ease fears, waiting rooms can be kept clear and in-person visits can be reserved for those who really need medical attention immediately”, mentions Brandon.
Doxy.me is striving to be the long-term telemedicine solution of choice. In upcoming days, its leading-edge platform will shape user experience and drive new developments in telehealth that improve the quality of delivered care. In order to make telemedicine available for all, it is putting a lot of effort into publicizing its provider successes. It also provided free licenses to some clinics that do amazing work in their communities.
