Looking for a doctor in the nearby location? Wondering whether the doctor is good or bad? How do his patients rate him? Worst, you want to crib about a doctor who gave you all those costly medicines for no bloody reason?

Well, hit the wild web – Indian doctors are embracing the new media and here is the grandest collection of Indian med portals:

HealthcareMagic

HealthcareMagic allows live interaction between doctors and patients, and is a integrated comparison shopping portal for health. Most importantly, the portal allows reviews of doctors/hospitals and healthcare products/services.

The site is nicely done and one can search for doctors/hospitals based on specialities/area code (neatly implemented area suggester), as well as chat with doctors online.

An interesting feature: Health Calculators (Pregnancy due date calculator, alcohol/smoking calculators etc)

MyDoctorsZone:

MyDoctosZone lets you search for hospitals, doctors, diagnostic/pathology centers, blood/eye bank, ambulance etc across the major cities.

The portal looks like a conduit to sell MyDoctorsZone Health Card that provides coverage of Healthcare Services to individuals and their family members, and access to portal’s nationwide network of doctors and health care products/services.

MeraMD.com

MeraMD is a health portal providing customized search for medical diseases and conditions. Additionally the portal provides local search for doctors, hospitals in your area.

MeraMD charges hospitals/doctors listing fee based on the feature plan, though the portal is of course, free for end users.

WebHealthcenter

Maintained by TCS, webhealthcenter is the oldest of all (read web1.0) and offers online consultation and one can store their health record/medical history at the portal. The site is also a place to hunt for healthcare jobs/media study materials.

Nice thing about all of the above mentioned sites is that they are free for the end user, and the monetization plan includes selling ad space, charging listing fee and selling medical products online and of course selling services (like insurance) to the community.

I am glad to see that doctors and medical associations are embracing new media and coming up with new ways to reach out to public.

Healthcare has been a well-guarded and walled service, devoid of any feedback/review from the patients. Services like these will hopefully remain unbiased and keep an eye on doctors/hospitals who indulge in unethical practices (right from wrong diagnosis, prescribing costly medicines/operations to selling kidneys)

What’s your take?

tags: healthcaremagic, mydoctorszone, meramd, webhealthcenter

Tags: find hospitals doctors online, healthcaremagic, meramd, mydoctorszone, webhealthcenter