I'm an internal medicine physician who uses this app to see patients after hours (patients who work during normal hours and cannot take time off) and because I enjoy answering patient questions (it's fun). This is a reasonably well designed app for virtual patient care for my needs (mostly casual use). The main problem with this application is that patient questions are submitted "raw" and are usually poorly worded and ambiguous. Thus, a common reply to patients is "see your doctor" because there is no sensible answer to what the patient asked. There should be a patient question "moderation" or "question review" where questions are reviewed with respect to are they appropriate. The patient questions should be filtered in some way: is this question something that should be asked on this system ... i.e., "What should I do about this crushing chest pain?" Is not an appropriate question --- the patient needs to dial 911 and get help live and in person. In some cases the question is not even coherent ... something like "I have big fingers" ... which may be a poor Google translation of a complicated question; incoherent questions should be returned to sender for clarification. The system is set up so that physicians can "invite" patients to see them over this system. For many older / non-internet using patients, this system is too difficult to use. Otherwise, this is a nice system and has a "free" and a "paid" mode of use. Thus, it may be possible to build an online patient base with the free mode and then switch to the paid mode when the demand / volume of patients justifies making the switch.
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