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Patients want health information in ways that doctors are not providing.
 
Patients want reliable answers to simple questions about the presentation, diagnosis, treatment options, side effects, and aftercare of their conditions. They want answers at speed, and increasingly delivered to their smartphones in video formats.
 
With difficulties gaining face-time with doctors, patients turn to the Internet. Worldwide, some three billion health-related Internet searches are made each year.
 
Patients experience difficulty finding reliable answers to their basic questions among more than two billion health websites. According to research published by the American National Institute of Health, 33% of adults who search the Internet for health information become confused by what they find. This frustrates their therapeutic journeys and makes for fraught doctor-patient relations.
 
Things are changing, however, and now patients have a new free-and-easy-to-use online platform, www.healthpad.net. This provides patients with video answers to their FAQs that can be accessed at speed at anytime, from anywhere on any hand held device.
HealthPad
HealthPad was started by doctors and launched in June 2013. It has accrued a growing exclusive healthcare content library of over 4,000 videos that provide patients with premium, reliable answers to their FAQs across 32 therapeutic pathways. 

This unique health content library with embedded search facilities, has been contributed by leading health providers from premier North American, European and South Asian medical institutions. 
 
HealthPad does more than reformat print content into digital words and substitute a website for books and journals. The platform leverages the online communications potential, and is an interactive, multimedia utility, which meets the needs, health status and personal backgrounds of patients and patient groups.   
 
Enhanced communications
HealthPad serves the needs of patients by enabling doctors to capture, organize and distribute their medical knowledge more effectively. Doctors can drag-and-drop any type of content into a publishing template: scans, pdf files, ppt. presentations, videos, diagrams, photos, commentaries etc. These data are instantly and automatically re-formatted into attractive rich-media publications. By a click of a mouse, doctors then can choose how they wish to share their publications, ranging from private and secure to public and open.
 
In addition to publishing health knowledge, doctors can use HealthPad to create, develop and manage any number of bespoke online patient groups. 
 
What doctors say about HealthPad
"My HealthPad videos personalize medicine and have positive psycho-social effects. Because of HealthPad patients feel that they know me before we have even met and are less inclined to be swayed by discordant and often incorrect medical information they encounter on the internet that can create misperceptions and fear". Dr. Whitfield Growdon, Onco-surgeon, Harvard University Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
 
"My patients now don't always have to attend a hospital for reliable information to help them manage their conditions. HealthPad allows me to reduce valuable face-time with my patients while improving doctor-patient relationships and patient compliance by helping them understand their conditions and treatments better". Dr Sufyan Hussain, an endocrinologist specializing in diabetes at Imperial College, London.
 
Drivers of change
The overwhelming majority of UK doctors provide medical information in pamphlet form, while the overwhelming majority of their patients have smartphones and broadband connections and use online services to find jobs, receive their salaries, pay bills and taxes, learn, conduct business and interact socially.
 
Technological change combined with the escalation of chronic non-communicable diseases, especially among the over 55s, is expected to increase Internet searches for premium and reliable medical knowledge and this will force health providers to change the way they communicate with patients.  
According to a recent Deloitte's report, in 2014 UK citizens over 55 will experience the fastest year-on-year rises in smartphone penetration. By the end of 2014, UK smartphone ownership is expected to surpass 50%, and the difference in smartphone penetration by age will disappear.     
This mirrors the rest of the world.
 
Takeaways
If you're a health provider, HealthPad can significantly improve your online communications, enhance the quality of your services and save you money.
 
If you're a patient, HealthPad provides you with free and easy access to exclusive, premium and reliable healthcare knowledge in video formats you prefer, at anytime, anywhere, anyhow. 
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