A Chat with Stephanie Eltz, CEO at HealthTech Company: Doctify

At Doctify, we want no patient to ever be left unheard. Through our review intelligence platform, we are committed to giving patients a voice in order to drive transparency and improvements across healthcare and social care.

We work closely with providers, including doctors, dentists, clinics, hospitals and care homes, to capture real, verified and unbiased feedback. This feedback helps them to gain a better understanding of the experiences of their patients and residents. We also analyse this data and supply providers with insights to drive better care and more rapid improvements, ensuring that the patient voice is the driving force of change within the industry.

All the feedback that we collect is made available online. Now more than ever, people are using online healthcare reviews to research specialists, and we are ensuring that information transparency exists in health and social care. People have the opportunity to read about others’ experiences so that they can feel confident in the steps that they take on their health and social care journeys.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Before launching Doctify, I was working as a trauma surgeon in the NHS. One day, I discovered a mole which I thought was cancerous and wanted to speak to a doctor who specialised in that area. I found it very difficult to get the right information online, despite being well connected in the medical world, which left me feeling really lost.

At the same time, Suman – my co-founder – was supporting an ill relative and struggling to find the right clinician. We both recognised that these issues could be solved using technology and so we decided to co-found Doctify to bring patients and doctors closer together.

I am so proud of the success that Doctify has achieved so far. Every month, millions of patients read our reviews to make important decisions about their health. We have nearly 25,000 healthcare providers in our network. We are growing in the UK, UAE, Austria, Germany, and Australia. And this is just the start! We have big plans for the future – we want to be the global healthcare platform helping patients and healthcare providers across the world.

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

Suman and I are very close to people who were working on the front line, so felt a huge responsibility to use our platform to help and support the industry.

Patients still needed health and social care throughout the pandemic. Despite face-to-face consultations often not being possible – or wanted – after a brief drop off at the very beginning of the pandemic, we started to see more people coming to Doctify. People were still reading reviews and seeking out services, especially ones they could access online.

So, we worked to build a solution that enabled people to access healthcare virtually. 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. Quickly, we created the largest network of video enabled consultants in the UK, making it easy for patients to find healthcare providers they could speak to during the pandemic. This enabled thousands of patients to find the care they needed without leaving the house.

We also placed a big focus on our team’s well-being to ensure they didn’t feel isolated or disconnected. We introduced wellness and self-development sessions to bring the team together virtually. We did meditation, online cook-alongs and pottery workshops. Our team is incredibly important to us, so having a workplace culture that people want to be a part of helps us thrive.

What can we hope to see from Doctify in the future?

As we continue on our mission to ensure no patient is left unheard, we plan on expanding into further healthcare markets across the globe. Currently we are in the UK, UAE, Germany, Austria and Australia.

We are also set to launch our global benchmarking tool for healthcare very soon. We work with providers to collect a lot of patient review data, and want to use it to make a real difference in the industry.  Healthcare providers will soon be measured against one another based on their patient feedback. The tool will use the patient’s voice to start driving real change within healthcare, showing providers what matters to patients, and how to better their experiences.