Meet doc-doc, the Colombian Telemedicine Company Improving Physician Wellbeing
Founder/CEO Gabriel Castillo is building on the success of WhatsApp to bring quick, affordable access to specialist care to Latin America.
The Challenge
Emergency departments operating at 4x capacity. Patients waiting months for an appointment with a specialist. Nine out of ten patients lacking private prepaid health insurance. These are just three of the conditions facing patients in Colombia that inspired Gabriel Castillo to build the telemedicine startup doc-doc.
But he also did it for physicians. When Castillo linked up with Dr. Laura Gutierrez, his Chief Medical Officer, he heard first hand how physicians in Colombia are being crushed financially. Doctors get paid nothing during their training years and after that’s over, they often have to wait months for a paycheck. “The burnout for doctors here is crazy,” says Castillo. “They go into medicine to help people, and then 10 years later they’re crushed by debt and mired in bureaucracy.” The result is that the suicide rate among doctors in Colombia is twice the national average.
“This cannot be right,” Castillo remembers Gutierrez saying during their early talks. “There must be another way.” And not just for Colombia, he decided, but for all of Latin America.
Origin Story
For Castillo and Gutierrez, the doc-doc partnership has been years in the making. The two met as children in school, when he was 8 and she was 12. He liked her, a lot. She was kind to him once when he got hurt on the playground and he never forgot. They reconnected more than a decade later, at university, while he was studying design and she pursued medicine. Castillo had founded a software company, and when his old school friend began to describe the burdens facing modern Colombian physicians he felt there must be a way that technology could help. How could he help physicians like his dear friend Laura reclaim the love of healing that inspired them to enter medicine in the first place?
At first, the team built a platform that used A.I. to help general practitioners arrive at a diagnosis more quickly. They rolled it out and hosted more than 6,000 doctor-patient encounters. “It was a huge social impact solution,” says Castillo, “but it wasn’t profitable.” That experience led doc-doc to build their current offering, a chat-based telemedicine platform that is sold on a subscription model with the aim of opening up access to specialty care while giving physicians a reliable source of side income.
We’re backing Castillo and his team because they’re improving the health and wellbeing of both patients and physicians, first in Colombia and then in Latin America.
Under the Hood
For patients, doc-doc is about quick, simple, affordable access to specialists via smartphone. Patients subscribe to doc-doc for $6 a month (USD) and gain unlimited access to chat with 18 types of specialists, from pediatricians (the most popular) to cardiologists. According to Castillo, it normally costs around $60 USD to see a specialist through the private healthcare system in Colombia (average monthly income is ~$310 USD), and patients with mandatory public insurance wait months to score an appointment.
Castillo designed doc-doc’s user experience to mirror that of WhatsApp, because the messaging app owned by Facebook is ubiquitous in Latin America. When users sign in, they’re presented with a menu of specialists. Clicking on their avatars reveals their professional biography and their availability. If the doc is online, the user can initiate a call instantly; otherwise they can set up a call for when the specialist is online. Once a chat with a physician is initiated, the platform looks and operates like a WhatsApp conversation, including the ability to send photos and videos.
A doc-doc appointment starts out as a chat with a specialist, but can lead to a suite of complementary services, like lab tests, exams and medications. Those ancillary services are currently handled manually through third-parties that have partnered with doc-doc, but will one day live inside of the doc-doc app.
Doctors earn money from each encounter (currently $2 USD) but since the chat is asynchronous, they are able to work with multiple patients at once. Castillo estimates that a doc-doc physician can add $500 per month to their income, and they receive payments every two weeks, rather than the delays they currently deal face.
Why We’re Proud to Invest
Thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown, telemedicine is seeing an explosion in adoption. But it still has a long way to go, and it’s going to take the long-term commitment of Health Transformers like Gabriel Castillo to bring its potential to the masses. We’re excited to see how Castillo and his team are taking the best tech in messaging and telemedicine from around the world and applying it in Latin America, where lower regulatory hurdles and high smartphone ownership have created a leapfrog opportunity.
While still early in the process, doc-doc is positioned to make a significant impact on access to care while lowering cost and improving the quality of life for physicians. Subscriptions are growing 300% each month, says Castillo, and there’s a waiting list of physicians who want to take consults on the platform. They’ve launched direct-to-consumer at first, but with new regulations compelling Colombian insurers to offer telemedicine, Castillo says that B2B isn’t far behind.
We’re backing Castillo and his team because they’re improving the health and wellbeing of both patients and physicians, first in Colombia and then in Latin America. Soon they’ll add video visits, appointment booking and e-prescribing to the platform, all with the goal of moving healthcare from episodic and reactive to continuous and proactive.
Castillo’s health moonshot vision? Take every patient “from doubt to cure,” regardless of the problem. That’s a mission we can get behind.
Message Gabriel Castillo via email at docdoc@startuphealth.com
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