7 Testing the Hypothesis

Opportunity: Patients lack the medical knowledge to decide what to do in situations that require medical care.

The Who: Patients, Families of Patients, Doctors

The What: An app that connects people with information on every type of ailment that will tell them how to deal with certain symptoms; also can connect them with on-call professionals (either in school or graduated) that can answer any questions in a chat format.

The Why: Sometimes people overreact and end up going to the hospital for things that can easily be treated at home, and end up spending way too much money on visits to urgent care, etc.

Testing the Who: Patients, the average individual in the United States do not have the information necessary to make educated decisions.

Testing the What: The boundaries would have to consider the cost of the chat services, as professionals will need to be compensated. But services like WebMD can sponsor this app so that all the information on a specific illness can be in one area.

Testing the Why: This will easily save hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially because a common complaint for patients is that they are not being told enough. Professionals on chat will be able to translate information so that it makes sense to the average individual who is not educated on the topic.

The interviews taught me that the app might shift to be a little more redundant if I completely focus on just the information provided by services like Web MD. The chat service provided by professionals will probably be the factor that makes this app stand out because it makes the ER and Urgent Care a little more accessible to patients as they get their more important questions answered from the comfort of their home. I also received a suggestion that patients should be able to upload pictures of their ailments for professionals to judge so that they feel more at ease when getting the information.