Posted by meramd
Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:32:00 GMT
We ended the previous post with the promise of telling you about the benefits of joining the meraMD medical community. Here's how you can benefit from the community
Be noticed
Not only within the medical community, as a thought leader in your domain, but also in the online space. Internet usage for medical information is growing by leaps and bounds and you sure want to have online visibility.
Get the latest updates on news and events
Talk about the events happening in your area that you want your colleagues to attend. You can come across event notifications that you may have otherwise missed. Also you would want to get the pointers to the latest medical happenings in real-time. meraMD.com will also be organizing events for medical professionals in the future. These will be a value add to you.
Get advice from gurus
If you are young into this profession, you may want to seek advice from people who have "been there done that". The purpose of the community is to help you in this communication.
Become a part of the voice of the profession
You can jointly speak as a single voice on issues that concern your profession. e.g reservation of seats in medical colleges, postings in villages, etc. See how your colleagues think and react to the same issue.
Get services from other providers
We will carefully select and add service providers to the network; so that the medical community becomes a one stop shop for you for all services e.g. We have added a medico-legal expert on our board and have started providing legal services to our registered members. We plan to add other service providers such as job consultants, equipment manufacturers and software vendors on board.
Publish your press releases
Often times you would want to publish something significant for the benefit of the medical community. This is the place that helps you publish your articles, press releases, research queries, etc and get meaningful inputs from your fellow members.
Get back in touch with old friends from your medical college and your city
You can search for your old college friends. Over the past year we have got multiple requests to help locate someone. This will renew your old ties. Don’t forget to add your college name to your profile! You can also search for colleagues in your own city. This will help you refer patients to medical professionals in other discipline.
If the above benefits are not sufficient, let us know... we have many more reasons why joining the medical community will benefit you!
Posted in meraMD Features, meraMD news | Tags doctor, network, professional, social | no comments
Posted by meramd
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMT
In the last post we covered the 10 reasons why doctors should create online presence. This post is about what we are doing to help doctors create and manage their online web information. Today, patients with access to internet, researches about a doctor before going for consultation. Research is done broadly in two ways:-
- Via search engines like google, yahoo etc.
- Find a doctor directories on trusted health website.
Our public profile provides a greater likelihood that potential patients will find you online. See for yourself the power of our listing, perform a google (search) for geeta bajaj ardee city gurgaon. Her meraMD public profile comes up at top of all results. meraMD.com provides a search platform where in patients can search on the basis of area/city and speciality.
In today's age, if prospective patients are hungry for information and if they don't find information about a particular doctor, they will move to the next one. Also it is very important to provide the correct and accurate information about oneself and their professional achievement on the internet. meraMD provides complete control to doctor for updating and maintaing their public profile. Creating a public profile is easy 2 step procedure at meraMD.com.
So as a doctor if you want to expand your career, it's time to start thinking of the way you are represented online. So what are you waiting for - click here to signup for meraMD.com public profile.
Posted in meraMD Features, Doctors and Hospitals | Tags directory, doctor, listing, profile, public, register, signup | 2 comments
Posted by meramd
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:32:00 GMT
There have been 3 special reports on Indian healthcare in The Times of India, Delhi edition, April 13, 2008. These are
1. Reduction of people wanting to get into this profession - Down from 233591 applications in 2006 to 161000 in 2008.
2. Doctors sick of the "torture" by the system
3. Shortage of specialists - just 6 doctors for 10000 people, in some regions like Chattisgarh the reported number is 2 per 100000 people!
All the reports are thought provoking and its time for action. So how do we solve the problem?
The report has suggestions for establishing more institutes of higher medical education and recognizing the medical degrees from other countries. But given that a senior resident at AIIMS gets a stipend that is much lower than the starting salaries of most IT graduates, we will need to attack the issue of doctor pay as well.
What are the other things that we can do?
1. Information Dissemination - ITC's eChoupal has been a success story.. the same platform that provides information about crops, seeds, weather and prices can also give information about diseases and conditions and medicines. This information will be needed to be provided in local languages.
MeraMD.com has a health search that can provide information from reliable sources, but we currently do not have local language support. Using the information obtained from world trusted sources doctor and medical associations, these translations can be done.
2. Telemedicine - We had talked to a number of specialists about telemedicine, but none were convinced about its efficacy as a diagnostic tool. Even if the doctors liked the idea, they were concerned about legal implications for the same. But there is no denying that telemedicine does make sense. It saves people from unnecessary travel and stay costs in many cases, where people from rural areas have to visit larger cities/towns for treatment. Much of this treatment can be diagnosed and administered remotely. 3. Mobile health centers - This requires more strain on the already tattering infrastructure. Doctors would have to visit the rural areas on a predefined schedule. The Indian government has tried to force doctors to be stationed in villages. We think that scheduled visits by mobile health centers may be better.
So what are the issues in the above solutions and why aren’t people already doing this? (Even if this is getting done, why is it not scaling?)
We think that the issues are:
1. Legal: Despite all disclaimers, it is dangerous to give medical information as it can be wrongly used, and can lead to litigation. Even in case of telemedicine, most doctors do not want to give any advice remotely. They are mainly worried about the responsibility factor.
2. Financial Viability: There will be long payback periods for telemedicine equipment. It will be difficult to implement any such program without support from government, hospitals and pharma companies.
So what can be done?
- Government needs to support initiatives like providing medical information to people both financially and legally.
- meraMD.com can ensure that the information is provided in local languages and for maintenance and searchability of the same. i.e. we can provide the back office and technical support.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags doctor, echoupal, healthcare, indian, shortage, telemedicine | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:36:00 GMT
Our doctors directory has now crossed 60,000 doctors!
There are about 600,000 doctors practicing in India as per different reports. So we are pleased with the above number. We are hoping that we will make this number reach 100,000 by August 2008.
The directory covers all cities in India, though the maximum doctors are from Mumbai.
Do ask your favourite doctor to join us here!
Posted in meraMD Features, meraMD news, Patients, Doctors and Hospitals | Tags contact, doctor, India | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:55:00 GMT
MeraMD.com has relaunched its community driven doctor and hospital recommendation service. This service allows users to recommend a health service provider (doctor, hospital, clinic) to others in the community.
MeraMD.com had launched this service in early 2008 and is now re-launching an improved version of this service based on comments and feedback from the users and medical service providers.
The major changes in new avatar of this service are:
- Registered Medical service providers are now informed whenever a recommendation is received for them.
- Negative/Offensive comments are now displayed to medical service providers for their comments, leading to a possibility of 1-to-1 dialogue between the service provider and the user.
- Users are informed about the action taken on their comments. Comments can be rejected, forwarded to medical service providers or made visible to community at the discretion of meraMD.com.
The new version of this service is expected to be more useful to the community. Some of the things that remain unchanged are: it is still a free service and there is still no registration required to add or view recommendations.
Posted in meraMD Features, meraMD news, Patients, Doctors and Hospitals | Tags doctor, hospital, recommend, suggest | no comments | no trackbacks
