Seven Surgeons Build a Clinic in the Cloud, But Will Patients Come?

Website

http://openclinic.com

Tell us about your project

Open Clinic is an online platform for any patient who wants to learn about heart surgery directly from a band of seven world-class heart surgeons at different institutions across the United States. These young surgeons of the Open Clinic are all equipped with web cameras to easily self-publish their own video answers to general questions about surgery that site users submit. Our mission is to build the most unbiased and accessible patient education experience online for every type of surgical patient. Highly literate or not, English-speaking or not, even lacking direct Internet access or not, it doesn’t matter. Our 'clinic in the cloud' is designed with these differences in mind from the very start. Open Clinic is not an e-consult service where patients can get specific medical diagnoses, but a long overdue learning community of surgeons and patients. Open Clinic is not here to replace clinic visits, but to supplement them in a way that feels more real than anything else online.

How could a week in the GOOD office help bring your idea to life?

Our big idea is to open up the Open Clinic platform to all communities of heart surgery patients and maximize their varying educational experiences from start to finish. Having just raised a net $3,000 (http://www.indiegogo.com/openclinic), we're one of many crowdfunding campaigns that fell short, but we're not discouraged. We feel as creative as ever. For one week, we'd like to plan, implement, and document a creative challenge to GOOD editors of the Health, Education, and Technology sections, and also GOOD brand strategist(s) -- can we together do with $3,000 and GOOD's collective network what we would have done alone with $15,000 (or more) to reach patient communities in need? Taking as much prioritized action as possible in one week, we'd track its progress after the week was over and report on how much measurable social impact and overall value had essentially been created for the Open Clinic in that one week at the GOOD office.

Discussion

7