Human Practice – Your Chicago Health 2.0 Startup Pitch Winner

How do you find or choose a new doctor?  I know I choose my doctors based on what family members, friends or current doctors recommend.  Sometimes though, you need to find a doctor and the above options may not be convenient or available.  Imagine if you relocated to a new city?  Where do you turn to reliably find a doctor or caregiver?

Currently, most existing online platforms are listing sites or indexes where either patients can post information and rate caregivers, or where caregivers can provide information on their clinics for reference by patients.  These systems are incomplete as they only provide information on one side or the other – and not from both.   (For more on this topic checkout  “Choosing your next doctor…” by Subbu Arumugam of Chicago Health Technology & Health 2.0.)

Human Practice, a web-based application in its pilot stages, aims to leverage social networking to get the right kind of information from both sides into the hands of the user.  Human Practice is not a search, index or ratings and review site.  In fact, it is more akin to a peer-to-peer or word-of-mouth system, where patients seeking care will be able to interact with qualified caregivers and caregivers will be able to connect with patients.

I spoke with Moses Hohman, the co-founder of Human Practice, fresh off  Human Practice’s win at the first annual Chicago Health 2.0 startup pitch contest during TechWeek.  Being at such an early stage, Hohman wants to keep some of the specifics about Human Practice quiet until they are worked out during the pilot program, however he was happy to share the following information.    Human Practice was founded in December 2010, but the idea had been swimming around in the head of Hohman and his wife and co-founder, Dr. Sehjin Han, for a while. When speaking about how the idea came to be, Hohman said, “my wife is a practicing doctor and she had the experience of people asking for recommendations for other doctors frequently.  Doctors, being notoriously busy, don’t always have time to find other doctors to recommend or may not be familiar with doctors in other practice areas.”

To get an idea of Human Practice’s vision for a better experience learning about your potential doctor view the pages of Jeannine R. Turner, MD, Andrew Albert, MD, MPH, Stephen P. Becker, MD.

Currently, Human Practice is a bootstrapped startup but they eventually plan to earn revenue by charging doctors a monthly fee, thus keeping the platform free for patients.  Near term, Human Practice wants to understand the unique needs of different medical specialties and caregivers in these specialties, as well as become widely adopted and used in the Chicago area.

I, for one, am excited to watch Human Practice develop and want to say congratulations to them on their win.  With prizes like the following, I think Human Practice is off to a good start.

Prizes:

• A Meeting with Tom Hawes, VP, Sandbox Industries and Daniel Phillips, Director, HealthBox
• A Meeting with Ira Weiss Managing Director, Hyde Park Angels and Professor, University of Chicago Booth Business School
• A Meeting with Michael Ferro Chairman, Merge Healthcare & CEO, Merrick Ventures
• A Mobile App Heuristic User Experience Review by Pathfinder Software’s UXD team
• One free seat for an upcoming Lean Building Blocks course with Bernhard Kappe, CEO, Pathfinder Software, Organizer, Chicago Lean Startup Circle and Todd Wyder, CEO, BrokerSavant, Lean Startup Student and Teacher
• One free ticket ($1750 value) to the national Health 2.0 Fall Conference in San Francisco on Sept 25-27, 2011.

For more information you can visit Human Practice or tweet them @humanpractice