My Return To The Consumerization Of Healthcare

Michael Sheeley
Make Great Software
3 min readMay 10, 2017

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I’m sitting next to my 3 month old daughter in Boston Children’s Hospital, arguably the best hospital the world. My daughter just had open heart surgery. The best doctors and nurses are literally just outside the door, and I’m on my phone searching Google for answers to questions about her condition. I ask the nurse practitioners about a few concerns I have about things I found online. They have me meet with the best specialist in the world about those exact concerns. The nurse practitioners and the specialist aren’t worried about these things I found online but they run some tests. They know it isn’t an issue. I’ve only scared myself while searching online but they run tests because that is what hospitals do. It is what the healthcare industry has been optimized to do. Results come back negative. I’ve wasted time, money, and resources. I try to stay away from Google as a way to answer my health questions, but I just can’t. I need to know more, but this time I don’t ask the medical staff about things I find. Instead, I go deeper in my own research. The results cause me to panic, bring about unneeded stress, and misinform me about the true situation at hand.

I’m not alone. A 2015 Rock Health survey of thousands of internet-connected U.S. adults showed that 71% of us search online for health information. And yet, that same survey shows that we don’t actually trust these sources of health information. Something is not right. Something needs to change.

My team and I have spent the last year looking into why people turn to online search when they have a health concern rather than asking their trusted healthcare professionals about these concerns. Many of them have 24/7 nurse hotlines run by their trusted and loved primary care doctors and pediatricians, but they often don’t turn to these resources for health questions, they turn to online search instead. Why? My team and I have researched, written code, built websites and apps, launched projects, run tests, conducted interviews with consumers and healthcare professionals, and ultimately have been working to create a service that can address this issue in a way no one else has.

People want answers to their health concerns. Searching online causes stress and misinformation, but how do we fix all of this? Previously, as I co-founded and led product at RunKeeper, I learned first hand what was driving the early stages of the consumerization of healthcare. Most of RunKeeper’s early users were using our product for the goal of losing weight, and many of them had been told by their doctors to exercise and get healthy. Fitness for them was a solution to bettering their health. These users were taking matters into their own hands while looking for digital solutions to guide them.

Overwhelmingly, people use fitness trackers, like RunKeeper, Fitbit, Strava, MapMyRun, and others to help find answers about their own health. How do I run to lose weight? How do I run my first 5k race? There are similarities to using Google search to find answers online about a rash, a bug bite, your kid’s cough, medication questions, or to learn about flu symptoms and other non-urgent health problems. People want to educate and empower themselves to take control of their own health. But people need help doing so. Providing people with nothing more than how many steps they have taken provides as few answers as does searching online and reading unrelated health forums with scattered and inaccurate information.

I believe people need to get answers from healthcare professionals who have had years of training, but this needs to be done in a way that our current healthcare system does not provide. It needs to be done as an entirely new system. Not a system that replaces the current healthcare system but one that meets a need that isn’t being addressed today. We need a new system that provides a compassionate way to listen to people’s concerns and simply provides high quality, personalized answers while shifting the education, empowerment, and even the decision making to consumers. We have found that people just want answers, and they need help and comfort in getting those answers.

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CoFounder/CEO of Nurse-1–1 | previous Co-founder RunKeeper | investor Legacy, Compt, Blissfully, Conjure, Zoba