Find­ing a doc­tor at short notice can real­ly hurt — that’s why a group of entre­pre­neurs from San Fran­cis­co have tak­en it upon them­selves to cre­ate a mobile app that pro­vides a pain free solution.

At a time when ‘Oba­macare’ has been dom­i­nat­ing head­lines, co-founder Ari Tul­la says the app was designed to be some­thing of a ‘vendet­ta against the bro­ken health­care sys­tem.’  The Bet­ter­Doc­tor app helps indi­vid­u­als imme­di­ate­ly locate physi­cians close to their loca­tion, and hands the pow­er back to the patients by sort­ing the med­ical pro­fes­sion­als list­ed using a com­plex rank­ing algorithm.

Diag­no­sis – rapid growth

The start-up is backed by $2.6 mil­lion of fund­ing from Soft­TechVC, 500 Star­tups and Bur­rill & Co, and now has the details of over one mil­lion physi­cians in its data­base, cov­er­ing 60 dif­fer­ent med­ical pro­fes­sions.  Found­ed by for­mer Nokia employ­ees, Ari Tul­la and Tapio Tolva­nen — with sim­plic­i­ty and ease of use at the fore­front of their minds — the iPhone and Android apps have expe­ri­enced star­tling growth, after launch­ing in Sep­tem­ber with just 5,000 doc­tors signed up to the data­base.  Four mil­lion peo­ple have used the site to find the per­fect health pro­fes­sion­al for their needs, with one mil­lion now using it each month.  The Bet­ter­Doc­tor team has also begun to expand rapid­ly, and now has 21 peo­ple on staff.

An injec­tion of mutu­al appeal

One of the keys to suc­cess for the app is the fact that it’s designed to appeal to both con­sumers and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als alike.  Physi­cians are encour­aged to take own­er­ship of their pro­file on the app, and offi­cial­ly ‘ver­i­fy’ them­selves.  The founders point out that some doc­tors who are list­ed on the ser­vice have already had more than 10,000 views reg­is­tered on their pro­files, so the app can pro­vide an effec­tive plat­form for physi­cians to get their ser­vices known through a tar­get­ed mobile adver­tis­ing mod­el.  Mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies take note, the app’s founders say it’s cru­cial that they remain com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing bal­anced results, and that the app fun­da­men­tal­ly avoids unfair­ly “reward­ing doc­tors who pay the most, but might not be of good quality.”