executive impact

Health info just one click away

4 Comments
By Chris Betros

If you need English info on where to find medical facilities and services in Japan and four other countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea), HealthyIM KK can help you. The company, established in January, recently launched a unique hospital search and review portal -- www.HealthyIM.com – a hospital & clinic search and review site covering nearly 200,000 medical institutions in Asia. Medical facilities are provided with their own promotional pages to easily upload information and photos about their specialties, doctors, facilities and other useful data to promote their hospitals both domestically and overseas. The service is free of charge for users.

For medical facilities, the basic plan is also free of charge. HealthyIM offers upgrades and advertising at a nominal fee to hospitals and clinics interested in a higher level of promotion. Users can easily search by medical specialty, location, language and other criteria in Japanese or English to find the medical institutions that best meet their needs.

The site is the brainchild of Michael Bobrove, founder and CEO of HealthyIM. Born in New York, he first came to Japan in 1982 and has worked in health care all his life.

Japan Today catches up with him to hear more about HealthyIM.

Why did you establish HealthyIM?

When you’re sick or you need some type of health care, knowing where to go is more important than anything else. Working in the health care industry for more than 20 years, so many people I knew would call me up, asking where to go for this or that. It got me thinking that it’s natural to want to get information from a trusted source.

During my career I have visited well over 1,000 hospitals in Japan. I have met some really great doctors and staff and have seen the best that Japan has to offer. I realized people in Japan don’t have sufficient knowledge of the best facilities to suit their medical needs. I wanted to do something new and useful in an area that I am familiar with, which will positively impact the world.

How was the launch?

We did a soft launch in late January and on May 9, we officially launched the site. Fortunately, the media is very interested. In a short time, Nikkei Business, Japan Today and others picked us up. We have already registered a couple of hundred users, mostly Japanese. The key for us now is to get the word out. We are asking everyone to help us help others by creating a strong base of medical facility user reviews. We are gathering real reviews from trustworthy folks who have experienced visits to hospitals and clinics. This combined with information from the facilities themselves is creating the trusted information source we are after.

How can the site help users?

If you need to find a hospital or clinic, you can easily enter the city, town and type of specialist you want to locate. HealthyIM provides a list and information and maps in English and Japanese of medical facilities that meet your needs. It also enables you to comment on your experience at a clinic or hospital, so you can tell others about it. For example, we had a woman contact us through the site who said that finding a hospital in Aomori saved her life when they discovered that she had cancer. She said other people should know about it. It wasn’t listed on our site, but now it is, thanks to her recommendation.

How many facilities are listed?

Currently, we have 185,000 Japanese medical facilities listed. We spent three years building the database, going to a lot of different sources to find details on the specialties and in which facilities English is spoken. This is becoming important because the Japanese government is looking at medical tourism and working on designating hospitals in Japan as foreigner-friendly.

How do hospitals use the site?

Hospitals actually take real-time control of the information on their pages, with the exception of user reviews, which they cannot alter. They can freely input content on things like doctors, staff, facilities and offerings as well as upload photos and blogs. All of their information is automatically translated into English or Japanese. One of the nice things happening now is that hospitals are contacting us and wanting to be listed on our site. Patients are also recently asking their hospitals and clinics to list on HealthyIM.

What is your business model?

Most websites are very hard to monetize. While we do offer advertising, it is not our main driver. Our business model is having hospitals pay for the service to have their own bilingual page and to promote themselves online. Just as Rakuten provides a mall for shopping, we provide a mall for hospitals. Some people liken us to Hotels.com for hospitals.

Hospitals we have talked to so far like it. We provide them with their own pages, global reach, automatic translation, advertising to drive traffic to their pages and a patient feedback system. When a user evaluates a hospital, the hospital gets a message saying they have been evaluated. The cost is reasonable -- 30,000 yen a month for full functionality. We also offer a professional translation option for about 8,000 yen a month.

How come you are including lists of facilities in other countries as well?

We have over 5,000 hospital listings for other countries in Asia because there are excellent health care options outside of Japan as well. People make a decision to go to a specific facility based on a number of criteria. For example, if you want a cosmetic procedure, you may want to get it done outside Japan, which actually happens for Japanese who go to Korea. It’s not that there aren’t great cosmetic surgeons in Japan. It is that one of the main reasons for choosing a plastic surgeon is that they can go far away from home and come back looking beautiful. Another person with a serious disease like cancer will be looking for the best hospital in the world for their treatment. Another may be financially constrained, so cost is a factor.

What is a typical day for you?

With an aim to constantly improve, I meet with a lot of people to get input on we need to do to make the site and our services better. I also meet with hospitals, clinics and health care companies that are interested in providing patients with more information.

We are continuously adding content. On our Facebook page, for example, we publish daily articles with health tips.

Right now, we are running a campaign where we are offering people a chance to win a trip to Singapore for medical tourism.

© Japan Today

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4 Comments
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The key to this will have to be trustworthy independent reviews. If the dominant message on the site is just hospitals blowing their own trumpets, it's not going to give potential users the information they really need. Reliable recommendations or criticisms, on the other hand, would be really useful. and how weird to have a question about why the site includes hospitals outside Japan. Why wouldn't it? And it's widely known that the standard in places like Thailand is very high, while the cost is low, and most staff speak fluent English. If a site's going to be oriented at non-Japanese speakers, Thailand is likely for many illnesses to be the preferred choice. Of course for a chronic illness, or one needing long-term follow-up, like a transplant, people may want to be closer to home.

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When looking for a hospital, getting word of mouth referrals from friends, relatives and people who work in health care is always a good start. When you are overseas another option is to check the Joint Commission which accredits health care organization internationally. Just check out the accredited hospitals in a foreign country by going to the Joint Commission Resource web site. Unfortunately some of those small Japanese hospitals are questionable. I like the great service provided by this newly establish company and commend him for this unique hospital search and review site.

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I didn't know Singapore is a medical tourism destination. I assume the prices would be considerably higher than in Bangkok, or maybe even Japan.

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Michael is a great guy, I did an audio podcast with him a few months back about HealthIM you can hear at:

http://asianbizblog.com/episode-7-michael-bobrove-of-healthyim/

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