• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

PatientFYI is Revolutionizing the Way Patients Find the Best Doctors to Serve Their Needs

Posted on: Monday, 19 January 2009, 12:05 CST

IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- PatientFYI (http://www.patientfyi.com), an innovative, free Website that promises to transform the way patients select doctors, debuted this week with information and service-specific Patient Referral capabilities on over 150,000 dentists, including over 50,000 with enhanced Practice Profiles.

"The internet has dramatically improved the way sellers present their strengths, and buyers make more informed decisions, in every industry except healthcare," said Jason Szczuka, President of PatientFYI. "PatientFYI is bringing these same improvements to the over 80% of patients that want to use the internet to find the best doctors for their specific needs," said Szczuka.

These unprecedented capabilities can be accessed directly on PatientFYI.com, and WebMD's fifty-two (52) million monthly visitors can use this tool to "Find The Best Dentist In Your Area", beginning March 1st.

"While others are beginning to scratch the surface of using the internet to provide information, their approaches have been incomprehensive and one-sided -- which too often pits doctors and patients against each other," said Szczuka. "PatientFYI's collaborative approach empowers both patients & doctors to easily engage each other with the actionable information that is most important to each of them," said Szczuka.

PatientFYI's breadth of information, coupled with its robust search capabilities, empowers patients to quickly find the best doctors for them -- by identifying the criteria they are most interested in; including advanced technologies utilized, doctor capabilities, payment options, and referrals from other patients that received the same service. "In essence, patients can now learn in under two minutes what would otherwise take over two months of interviewing doctors to learn," said Szczuka.

In addition to the 90% of respondents interested in learning what types of advanced technology a doctor uses, according to a recent survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, 83% of respondents stated that they would even switch doctors based on the information they find on a website such as PatientFYI -- with over 56% of them willing to pay more for a doctor they know delivers outstanding services.

"The primitive days of having to make such an important decision based on limited information and the recommendation from one friend or family member, who's needs were probably very different than yours, are over starting today," said Szczuka.

PatientFYI's collaborative approach also provides doctors with the flexible online presence capabilities that many have been seeking. In addition to doctors being able to quickly update their Practice Profiles, PatientFYI's service-specific referral tool was developed in collaboration with both dentists and patients. This unique feature, unlike the unstructured blogs that are proliferating across the Web, even includes the ability for patients to submit a referral in paper format and empowers these participating doctors to post constructive responses alongside any referral they receive.

"With 69% of current patients saying they would submit a Patient Referral if asked, and nearly 70% of new patients wanting to consider a doctor's response to these comments during their decision-making process, we clearly saw that the generic, one size fits all, approach taken by most websites today was not meeting the needs of neither patients or doctors," said Szczuka.

PatientFYI anticipates rapid expansion into many other medical specialties. "We believe consumers will agree that PatientFYI enables them to select the best doctor to serve their needs, and that there are many other categories that consumers are researching online -- which we intend to quickly include," said Kelly McCrann, Chairman of PatientFYI.

SOURCE PatientFYI

Source: PR Newswire

More News in this Category