DoctorBase
| 200px | |
| Private | |
| Founded | San Francisco, California, USA (2010) |
| Headquarters | 576 Sacramento St. 3rd + 7th Floors, San Francisco, CA 94111 |
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Key people
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John Kim Founder & CEO |
| Products | Patient Engagement, Practice Marketing |
| Website | http://www.doctorbase.com |
Founded in April 2010, DoctorBase develops "Mobile Healthcare as a Service" technologies that allow doctors to provide their patients mobile messaging. DoctorBase was acquired by Kareo, a medical practice management software and medical billing company, on March 10, 2015.[1]
Contents
Background
The founders of DoctorBase are John Sung Kim (founder of Five9) and Mischa Spiegelmock (who helped develop LiveJournal’s large scale blogging platform.) DoctorBase, a mobile-based patient engagement platform, was started by John Sung Kim under the hypothesis that marketing automation was the key to driving user adoption in healthcare. The company now services over 10,000 medical providers and nearly 4 million patients on its HIPAA compliant system.
PANDA (Patient and Doctor Application) is the company's SaaS product and is based on HTML5, Bootstrap (front-end framework), Knockout (web framework), Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Panda 6 was released on August 20, 2013. As of December 15, 2013 it transacted an average of 12,000 secure medical messages a day between patients and healthcare providers.
Electronic health record (EHR) integrations
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Medical Justice Controversy
On December 1, 2011, ABCNews published an article about the rights of patients to review doctors and a private company called Medical Justice regarding Dr. Stacy Makhnevich. The controversy revolved around the rights of doctors to remove negative reviews as DoctorBase refused demands from Dr. Makhnevich's attorney to remove negative reviews from its site; citing that the patient had been verified as an authentic patient through its PANDA software.
Medical Justice "sells the agreement forms to health care providers" which a patient must sign before visiting the doctor. After receiving several negative reviews from a patient named Robert Lee (one of which was on DoctorBase), Dr. Makhnevich ordered him to immediately remove the negative reviews citing the form he signed when he first visited her office "warning him that he violated the agreement and threatening to sue for breach of contract." The doctor "sent Lee an invoice for $100 for each day the criticism remained online."[2][3]
Dr. Makhnevich repeatedly threatened to bring legal action against DoctorBase and asked them to remove the review; which DoctorBase refused.
Lee spoke to Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, who filed a lawsuit against the offices of Dr. Stacy Makhnevich. (Lee vs. Makhnevich.[4])
Dr. Makhnevich and her lawyers argued the "lawsuit should be dismissed because Lee did not assert that the copyrights are not registered, and registration is required in copyright infringement cases" and asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed.[5]
After Lee vs. Makhnevich was filed and word got out, several other patients around the nation followed suit in speaking out about their freedom of speech and against doctors who tried to squelch their reviews which also resulted in similar lawsuits.
Also, Medical Justice announced they would not recommend that doctors have their patients sign the aforementioned forms.[6]
References
- ↑ "Med software vendor Kareo expands offerings with acquisition", ModernHealthcare.com
- ↑ Dentist Threatens to Sue Patient for Reviews
- ↑ Doctors try to squelch online reviews
- ↑ Lee vs. Makhnevich
- ↑ Lee v. Makhnevich et al.: Makhnevich Files a Motion to Dismiss
- ↑ Medical Injustice – Contracts That Suppress Patient Comments About Their Doctors or Dentists
