Startup Review : MeraMD.com , MyDoctorsZone.com
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After reviewing startups for sharing pictures, editing pictures, adding effects to pictures, adding pictures to videos, and vice-versa, sending SMS to all your friends, sending SMS when they are online, sending SMS when they do not want to receive SMS, publishing pictures through mobile, blogging-singing-dancing-advertising and doing almost-everything from mobile, I was happy to review two web startups that have nothing to do with mobile, pictures-sharing or social-networking.
MeraMD.com is an Internet startup that greets you with an interface that is light on eyes and has form field to select the city name and write a hospital’s name. I selected “Delhi” from the list of the cities and left the other column blank and clicked on “Submit”. 159 results showed up, with their addresses. What was missing was , however the phone numbers and email addresses. In the left pane, there were options of refining the search further by specific area and on the right-hand side were the omnipresent Google Ads.
Clicking on a hospital’s name will take you to a profile page for the hospital. The “General Info” tab on this page contains the name, address, phone numbers and fax numbers of the hospital. The second tab “Recommendations” shows the recommendations for that particular hospital. And the third tab will help you make recommendation for a hospital. Here, you can rate the hospital on a scale of 1-to-10, and put additional comments about it.
This is where it adds a lot of value.
However, there were not any reviews that I could find. Even Delhi’s renowned Moolchand Hospital had no recommendations. But as the user base builds up and the word gets out, we can expect more reviews and a rating system which will take 
into account the cumulative feedback of different users.
Some of the prominent hospitals like Delhi’s AIIMS and Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital were missing.
The website is not as content-rich as it appears form the homepage. Clicking on a topic from the “Top Health Topics” list in the left pane of the home page gives you a Google result for that topic.
The topics under “Insurance” list has some content, but its not very compelling. It would do good to have extensive information on these topics. Content is something that can pull the users, can the longer the user stays on your site, the more money you can make out.
Under “Health Tools”, a tool called “Symptom Checker” was especially interesting. It uses a Harvard
Medical School application to tell you the symptoms, given the name of a disease. This can be a god reference point. The service was quick and extensive.
The “BMI” tool is another useful tool. Just type in your height and weight and it calculates your Body Mass Index and also gives if you are normal, underweight or overweight and also how much weight do you need to lose/gain.
Overall a descent website with a simple but interesting concept. There is definitely a need to such information. But as I noted, the monetization seems to be through Google ads, or at least, one of the channels of revenues is definitely Ads, so they need to jack up the content on the website. The more the time a user spends on your website, the more you make out of her.
But a decent concept nonetheless.
And they have a blog.
MyDoctorsZone.com is another of the Internet startup aiming at collating hospitals information at one place.
Their database is not as populated, though. This site seems like a poor cousin of MeraMD.com. The execution was not so taut. And the information was solely missing. This site seemed to be in pre-alpha state, where the developers are just checking the designs.
An interesting piece was this note placed under the “Emergency Health Record”
Mydoctorszone Health record helps the member and Health care providers to access the health record in time of emergency or need. The Health Card Member ID has been given to users as a mutual understanding with them by the Member. mydoctorszone is not responsible for any misuse of the Card or the Health Record
So, medical records updation is (will be) available for sure. However, in what formats, and if users will be willing to do that is a question that seems to have a firm “No” as an answer. Why shouldn’t I upload my medical records on my Gmail account rather than placing it on some new, unverified website?
Apart from this, there is really nothing much to review about this website. This is essentially a very stripped down version of some useful medical website. With the kind of services that MeraMD offered, this site seems like unwanted to me.
Only, if like in the online advertising and online travel space, online medical information space (whatever it means) is going to witness a boom, can this site manage to hold interest.
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The portals are sure to aid in search efforts for the people looking for medical treatments but would have to compete with dozens of web directories which people are hooked. But seeing the content , especially mydoctorszone.com we can assume the visitors to be returning.
Dear Mr Saxena,
Thanks for the excellent review for our site http://www.meraMD.com.
If you visit again, you will see that we now have 399 (earlier 159) records for Delhi. We have also added AIIMS. We will tackle Mumbai next :-).
Thanks for the feedback and we hope to get such feedback from all our users. Do put in a recommendation for the care providers that you like, when you visit us next.
Regards,
CustomerCare
meraMD.com