Mark Dumoff believes if patients like their doctors, they'll be more inclined to listen to them, follow their directions, get better or stay healthy and keep health care costs down.
Dumoff was so convinced of this after a frustrating experience hunting for a specialist for his sick father that he started DocInsight in November 2005. His goal was to build a database of physicians to help patients find the right doctors.
"People end up getting lost in the medical maze," he said. "There's not much quality information out there. We have nothing else available other than word of mouth."
To build a database of patient feedback on doctors, DocInsight has designed a service targeted to insurance companies to electronically survey patients, gather feedback and then generate summary reports.
"We are uniquely measuring the patient's experience of care," said Dumoff.
EmblemHealth Inc., the largest health insurer based in New York, is using the service in a pilot program to monitor and track patient data as part of a federal government project looking to redesign the way care is administered to Medicare patients with continuing illnesses. DocInsight is pursuing the 22 other insurers and businesses participating in the federal project.
Dumoff, 52, was the primary founder of the business and used personal investments in combination with a private placement memorandum -- a vehicle for emerging businesses to raise capital from selling an equity position to private accredited investors. Business associates Dumoff has known over the years helped with in-kind contributions such as logo design, printing of stationery, consumer research and marketing.
"It's the most satisfying thing I've ever done," said Dumoff.
Many entrepreneurs describe a single experience as the spark behind their venture. Dumoff's came in early 2005 when his father, then 78, was very ill with heart trouble. His first visit to a specialist didn't go well.
"It was like the visit from hell," said Dumoff. "He scared me to death." The specialist was arrogant, discourteous of his dad's age and frail state, and delivered a judgment of either surgery or death, Dumoff said. Instead of reassuring them, his diagnosis created suspicion and doubt.
So he turned to an administrator at a hospital in his father's health plan who recommended another doctor. That physician instantly made Dumoff and his father feel comfortable and cared for, and eventually performed surgery to repair his dad's heart valves.
"Within five minutes, my dad trusted this man," he said. "The outcome was terrific, but the patient experience was priceless."
Crafting better ways to communicate is the essence of Dumoff's background. For 30 years he's worked in information technology doing sales and marketing, writing business forms and investor booklets and designing information management systems.
"Everything I've done has really paved the way to take information design, technology, business communication and customer experience management and apply it in a creative way," said Dumoff.
DocInsight's service works like this: Insurers in a pilot program would pay DocInsight a "per member per month" subscription fee ranging from 5 to 10 cents to access its Web portal, or gateway. They don't have to buy, install or maintain software.
There are two portals -- one for insurers and one for doctors. Insurers log on to verify that patients who will receive surveys are legitimate health-plan members and visited the practice on the days noted. They also can get reports on doctors' performance based on patient feedback, which is anonymous.
"It provides the insurers a lens to identify who are the high-performing doctors," said Dumoff, which they use to determine incentive pay to the doctors, known as "pay for performance."
"This will help the insurer to drive quality improvement, improve patient satisfaction and increase [patient] adherence and reduce cost," he said.
Doctors can log on to their portal to view the reports. "It could help doctors identify ways to improve their practice," said Dumoff.
Pricing for the service varies according to factors such as the number of participating doctors, where they practice, reporting requirements, number of patients, language for the surveys and other needed communications, said Dumoff.
A key move for the company was partnering with IBM in 2007 to run its portal on IBM's scalable technology that will allow customers to eventually perform a high number of transactions, such as the alert functions planned for the service's upgrade.
"It's a strategic relationship -- a very important relationship for us," said Dumoff.
The next version of the system will electronically check patients' adherence to filling prescriptions, send alerts about possible adverse side effects to medication and e-mail results to doctors.
Dumoff said the largest challenge to the business is "raising early stage investment capital in this economy," and he is pursuing funds to hire software engineers, fill leadership positions and develop business and new versions for the service.
"We're at that critical stage where we have to dot i's and cross t's," said Dumoff. "I finally see light coming and it's not an oncoming train."
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Copyright (C) 2009, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.