In 2011, Co-Founder, and one of accelerateHER’s top fifty inspiring women, Stephanie Eltz, relocated from Vienna to the UK to work for the NHS as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon. It was during this period that her career started to take a very different path. After discovering a mole which she believed could be cancerous, Stephanie sought to find a specialist to help her. However, this proved to be more difficult than anticipated and led to a lot of apprehension. 

“I urgently wanted to speak to a specialist in that area. Even though I worked in the medical field, finding a specialist I could trust was difficult, leaving me feeling lost and worried.” 

From fear to fierce 

It was after Stephanie took her concern over the lack of reliable sources to her friend and colleague, Suman Saha, who was also struggling to find the right care for a relative, that they realised the problem was a lot more widespread. It was this realisation that led to the co-creation of Doctify. 

“We live in a world where finding a reliable taxi driver or restaurant is simpler than finding the right care. This inspired us to create a solution.” 

The co-founders believed the answer could be found by bridging healthcare with technology to create an accessible, trustworthy platform for people to find the care they needed. 

Thus, in 2015, Doctify was born. 

The vision 

“We could see that making a review platform with real-time, verified feedback could help patients improve their health. People would have a better idea of what to expect from the care they were looking into ... At the same time, we wanted healthcare providers to easily collect feedback and use it to make the right changes to their care. 

“With 84% of people trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations, we want to enable people looking for the right provider or treatment online to hear directly from previous patients. Having access to verified and meaningful reviews gives people better visibility of their healthcare options, empowering them to make more informed decisions about their health. 

“The platform is engineered to build greater trust and transparency across the healthcare sector by ensuring that no patient is left unheard.” 

The overarching aim for Doctify is to ensure that people seeking medical care feel confident the platform will find the best expert and right treatment for them, no matter how rare their illness may be. 

With over 50 million people being helped since the company’s inception, it’s not surprising they won the Hustle Award for Most Successful Scaleup. And not ones to rest on their laurels, the co-founders plan on doubling that figure to 100 million by 2025. 

Tech for both sides of the platform 

To ensure healthcare providers can offer the best care to their patients, Doctify uses machine learning to transform every patient review into easily digestible insights. From this information, providers can ascertain what matters the most to their patients and if there are any improvements they need to prioritise. 

The platform’s dashboard helps medical professionals drill-down reviews and insights into various areas, allowing them to have a deeper analysis, therefore a greater understanding, of their patients and their needs. 

For patients, they can simply search for appropriate providers and treatments and feel assured that they will be a trusted and verified professional. All the reviews that Doctify receive are tagged by several metrics which can be broken down by speciality, treatment, and location, helping the patient to find exactly what they are looking for. 

“[We] continually invest in our prevention and detection strategies to ensure that the reviews we collect are authentic … we are on a mission to ensure that no patient is left unheard, [and] we remain committed to building a platform containing genuine experiences from real patients. 

“We want to make this experience seamless and stress-free so that every patient can feel confident in the decisions they make about their healthcare.” 

Gathering data 

Automated feedback allows the providers to collect and publish real-time patient feedback in vast quantities, which they can utilise to support their delivery of patient-centric care.  

“We want to provide the entire healthcare universe, from … hospitals [to] care homes, with the tools they need to understand what their patients think about the care they have received. 

“We love that healthcare providers value Doctify for its ability to support their person-centric care. At the same time, by having more representative and meaningful reviews online, they can reach more people searching for their expertise”. 

Trust and Transparency are the beating heart of Doctify. To achieve this, the Co-Founders have ensured that every provider they have on their platform agrees to publish all reviews they receive – whether positive or negative. 

The system is designed to keep fake and dishonest reviews off the platform by asking patients to include their mobile phone numbers when they fill out a Doctify review. Once a review is submitted, they are sent an SMS message to verify their feedback. Other ways they collect feedback is by furnishing the facility with tablets, kiosks and touchless methods – such as QR code. 

“We are currently exploring additional verification procedures to retain anonymity while increasing the reliability of our system.” 

Successfully scalingup in a Covid world 

The company now have a network of over 25,000 professionals, hospitals, clinics, and practices each of whom have signed up to the Doctify ethos of trust and transparency. The team has doubled in the last year alone and expansion across in the UK, UAE, Austria, Germany, and Australia is on the horizon. 

They encountered their biggest challenge when the Covid-19 pandemic swept through the nation and face-to-face consultations were limited. It was during this time that more and more patients utilised the platform, trying to find specialists that they could access remotely. 

The team needed to act quickly to ensure that patients could still get the care they needed. This led them to create a virtual healthcare system. 

“We launched a remote consultation tool in a matter of weeks. Then, we approached our network of doctors and overnight, added ‘video flags’ to their Doctify profiles. We quickly built the UK's largest network of video-enabled consultants, which made it easy for people to find doctors they could talk to during the pandemic. This enabled thousands of patients to find and access the care they needed without leaving the house.” 

What the future holds 

“We will be using our new funding round to fuel the development of our new global benchmarking tool, which will allow providers to measure their procedures, treatments and consultants against peers, colleagues and competitors on a national and international scale. 

“We will also be continuing to expand across all our markets, building partnerships with healthcare professionals, clinics, hospitals, care homes and insurance networks to become the leading review platform trusted by patients and providers everywhere.”