Is your doctor or dentist any good? Doctify will tell you

‍Hi Stephanie! What does Doctify do?

Doctify is a healthcare review platform building greater trust and transparency across the sector by ensuring no patient is left unheard.

We make it easy for healthcare providers to collect and publish greater volumes of real-time patient feedback. We also transform their reviews into valuable and actionable insights to support their delivery of patient-centric care.

At the same time, publishing feedback online also supports patients in need of healthcare. Through our platform, they're able to research into reviews left by other patients, allowing them to take control of their health and make the right choices for their care.

What were you doing before and what inspired you to take the leap and become a tech entrepreneur?

I started my career as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon. In 2011, I moved from Vienna to Oxford to join the NHS. One day, I discovered a mole which I thought was cancerous and I urgently wanted to speak to a specialist in that area. Despite being connected in the medical world, it was tough to find a specialist I trusted, which left me feeling lost and anxious.

After speaking to friend and fellow surgeon Suman Saha, we realised that many people were struggling to source doctors or treatments confidently. We live in a world where it's easier to find a trusted taxi driver or restaurant than the right specialist or treatment. This motivated us to create a solution. Our passion for using technology to solve wider healthcare problems inspired us to co-found Doctify in 2015 together.

We could see that creating a review platform containing real-time verified feedback had the potential to support patients in their healthcare journeys. Accessing meaningful and trustworthy reviews would provide people with a clearer understanding of what to expect from the care they were looking into or accessing. At the same time, we wanted healthcare providers to be able to easily collect feedback and use the insights to drive the right improvements to their care, enhancing patient experiences.

Launching Doctify has been an incredible journey which has allowed me to support more patients than I would have ever been able to do as a surgeon. To this day, we have helped over 50 million patients find the best specialist for their needs, and this is just the beginning.

What makes Doctify different from other review platforms?

Suman and I are both surgeons by background, and spent many years in the healthcare industry before co-founding Doctify. We understand providers' and patients' struggles first-hand, which allows us to offer unique perspectives on supporting and transforming the healthcare world.

Before Doctify, healthcare providers often found sourcing reliable and up-to-date patient feedback challenging. Reviews were typically collected on an ad-hoc basis through paper forms, which led to low engagement and low response quality. As these reviews were rarely published online, it also made it harder for people to choose a provider confidently. With Doctify, healthcare professionals have the tools to hear more from their patients and people researching healthcare have a trusted place to read about the experiences of their fellow patients.

We always wanted Doctify to be this reliable source for meaningful insights. That's why trust and transparency are at the bedrock of Doctify. While feedback platforms can struggle with dishonest and misleading reviews, we use strong verification methods and continually invest in our prevention and detection strategies to ensure that the reviews we collect are authentic. As we are on a mission to ensure that no patient is left unheard, we remain committed to building a platform containing genuine experiences from real patients

Where is the business today? 

Following our UK launch in 2015, Doctify is now available in Austria, Germany, Australia and the UAE, with plans to go global. We have also expanded our offering to support care homes in capturing the voices of residents and their families.

To this day, we have helped over 50 million patients make informed decisions about their care.

Recently, Doctify has been listed in the Financial Times 1000 — Europe's Fastest-Growing Companies report as the second rapidly-growing healthtech company in the UK and 19th in Europe. It’s an exciting time for us, and it makes me so proud of the success that we have achieved so far. I can't wait to see what the future holds!

What is the secret to making the business work?

It helps to be passionate about the problem you are trying to solve. My co-founder and I are both committed to the Doctify mission of ensuring that no patient is left unheard.

Having the right support network around you is also something I have found to be incredibly helpful. Suman and I come from medical backgrounds, and we both had so much to learn when becoming entrepreneurs. We joined mentorship programmes for first-time entrepreneurs to get advice and coaching during our acceleration and growth. To this day, we continue to receive guidance from our peers. Running a business is a never-ending learning curve with many ups and downs. It's great to know we have a strong support group around us we can rely on in times of need.

But most importantly, I think that taking care of your mental and physical wellbeing is the key to making your business work. Launching a startup comes with pressure and challenges. It can be hard to find the right balance between work and life, so it's essential to set your boundaries from the beginning. There's nothing wrong with going offline and taking care of yourself.

What funding do you have?

We are lucky to be supported by investors who believe in Doctify and share our ethos, like Amadeus Capital, Keen Ventures and Guinness Asset Management. They have significant experience and resources in the healthtech sector, which has enabled us to grow in the UK and beyond.

We are now raising Series B funding to accelerate Doctify’s growth across multiple countries. We want to keep innovating and bringing even more value to the healthcare industry.

What are your plans for the future?

We are on a mission to become a global healthcare review platform. By 2025, we want Doctify to have helped 100 million patients confidently make the right choices for their care.

We will be using our new funding round to fuel the development of our new global benchmarking tool, which will allow providers to measure their procedures, treatments and consultants against peers, colleagues and competitors on a national and international scale.

We will also be continuing to expand across all our markets, building partnerships with healthcare professionals, clinics, hospitals, care homes and insurance networks to become the leading review platform trusted by patients and providers everywhere.

We are also actively growing our team and enhancing the company culture. I am a huge advocate of family-friendly and flexible work environments, and I want to offer our team a supportive and accommodating workplace where they can thrive.