Medical Voyce seeks to help doctors, patients

The Internet is awash in medical information. What it’s been lacking, said Dirk Hobbs of Colorado Springs, is medical resources.

There needs to be an easier way for physicians to communicate with each other and for patients to find a doctor, Hobbs said. His new venture, Medical Voyce, seeks to meet those needs.

Medical Voyce is a Web site, medicalvoyce.com, with information and tools for doctors, including a directory for referrals and articles on medical, legal and business issues relating to running a medical practice,

“This information is in disparate places all over the universe, but it’s not coordinated,” Hobbs said.

Hobbs is launching Medical Voyce in partnership with the El Paso County Medical Society. Medical Voyce’s technology will power a revamped Web site for the medical society (epcms.org), which goes live Tuesday, National Doctors’ Day. The two sites will share content as well.

Carol Walker, executive vice president of the medical society, said her members helped design their new site and it should make being a local doctor easier.

“We had to offer more information than we had and quicker, easier, more efficient access,” Walker said. “We wanted to provide an improved tool for physicians to communicate.”

Part of the society’s new site will be a public portal so patients can research local doctors and specialists. Walker said that will be a good tool for consumers and a boon to the society, which receives many calls from people looking for referrals.

Collecting articles and resources in one spot will also help time-strapped physicians, Walker said.

“They are so inundated with so much information it is difficult to keep track of all of it,” she said.

Although Medical Voyce is starting at home in Colorado Springs, Hobbs plans to roll it out statewide and in six other states in the coming months, with the same sort of information, discussion boards and online support groups that are on the El Paso County Medical Society’s site.

“The long-term goal is literally to create the face of medicine,” he said.

One big addition Hobbs is planning is a “Talk to a Doc” feature, allowing patients to ask questions about ongoing medical concerns without the trouble of an office visit. For doctors, the system will allow them to get paid for some of the phone or e-mail consultations they now do for free. Hobbs said doctors will set their own prices, but he’s encouraging them to keep the cost below the average co-pay for an office visit.

Hobbs was the publisher of the regional medical magazine M.D. News for nine years and runs a medical consulting business.

It’s getting harder and harder to be a doctor, he said, with the financial and time pressures they face today.

“I’ve really developed a lot of empathy for this profession,” Hobbs said. “They’re really getting beat up six ways to Sunday.”
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