I agree, but there is room to think about a tech solution a little further.

What if the patient himself foster the communication? If the patient can input all the symptoms and the results of all the exams ordered by one doctor, the system can detect all the "red flags" that a particular result raises and tell you which kind of specialist should take a look at it. Example: your cardiologist register dizziness and high blood pressure. The system knows that a cardiologist already saw it, but it also alert you that these results and symptoms should be studied by a neurologist and a endocrinologists.

Using the examples of dizziness and high blood pressure, you've got thousands of possible outcomes and stroke is not the most common. This is an incredibly complex system, made more so by the fact that it's so individual. If I experience dizziness and high blood pressure, it potentially means something quite different than if you do.

I'm not saying it isn't worthwhile. It is. But let's say you raise all these symptoms and red flags and decide you need specialized testing from 3 different specialists. Then it turns out you didn't need that testing at all.

Who pays for it? Your insurance company won't.

One of the things I'm working on right now is software to facilitate the coding process for payment and insurance purposes, and let me tell you, it is complex for a reason. The insurance companies do NOT want to pay.

This is changing. One of the most likely potential models is a condition based pay model. An example case would be a 50 year old smoker with high blood pressure; the insurance company says, ok, on average it costs $1000 to cover this person for one year. They pay the hospital $1000. If the patient needs a procedure, the hospital eats the excess cost. If the patient needs no procedure, the insurance company does.

Now, couple this with a change in how MD's are reimbursed, so it's a performance based plan rather than a procedure based plan, and you have a more efficient and better managed system.

We're not quite there yet. When we are, your planned software might work. Give it 1.5-2 years at a minimum. The new coding processes come out in 2014 and we're shifting away from private practice, but it takes time.

indeed, i think the patient (and family) probably cares more about patient's health than the doctors (unfortunately true). my solution is along the lines of what healthtap is doing, the patient posts a question and a few real doctors respond back, the patient makes a better informed decision than rely on a single physician to make or break his/her life!

one big difference between what i am developing versus what healthtap is doing is that i want to develop some sort of scoring for doctors' responses so that we can help the patient make a better decision instead of being confused with 10 or 20 different responses. actually even worse, many doctor responses on healthtap and other such sites is something along the lines of "you should see your doctor", duh!

guess you are right to an extent, doctors may not be the best communicators given the nature of the profession, privacy laws, time etc however, sometimes a nudge could make all the difference, don't you think? a nudge from an "app" to prompt the doctor to think of other possibilities beyond their expertise.