Zable Health says it is empowering patients with information. Others don’t necessarily agree.
For years, the Department of Health and Aged Care struggled to get non-GP specialist doctors to list fees on its $20 million Medical Costs Finder website.
Six months ago, startup Zable Health went live with a site showing not just price ranges for specialist doctors, but average wait times too.
It quickly outpaced the DoHAC website in terms of the number of specialists listed.
Zable contacted practices directly asking for fee and wait time information.
While it received applause in mainstream media at the time, clearly some people are uncomfortable with the company.
The letter
In October we received an envelope postmarked October and signed “Zable whistleblower”.
Inside were a bundle of printouts, mostly screenshots from a forum discussion which spanned from November 2023 to the end of July this year.
It’s important to note that, while the website was online, Zable Health did not officially launch until July 2024; most of the posts on the forum thread predate its launch.
Users were mainly concerned that some doctors appeared to be listed without their knowledge, sometimes with false information attached to their profile which appeared to be AI generated.
When contacting Zable to request their profile be taken down, they were asked to confirm their date of birth.
Zable co-founder Scott Gentle – a physiotherapist by trade – made his own post on the forum in defence of the company.
“Zable Health was founded to address gaps in the healthcare system,” he wrote.
“We are a registered and legitimate business dedicated to improving healthcare accessibility.
“Our mission is driven by a genuine desire to make a positive impact on patient outcomes.”
Several commenters questioned how Zable was able to meaningfully contribute to healthcare.
“How does your service make it easier for customers to afford to pay for the specialist?” one forum user wrote.
“Are you getting the specialists to offer cheaper consultations through your service?
“If a particular specialist in the patient’s area is fully booked up for a month or two in advance (not unusual even going back 20+ years), how does your service manage to get the patient seen any faster?”
Zable’s response
The startup’s other co-founder, Matthew Gregory, told The Medical Republic that while many doctors were indeed listed on the site without their knowledge, very few had come forward asking to be removed from the directory.
“Because of the bold approach we took, I expected there to be probably over 1000 providers that would say they didn’t want to be part of the system, from day one,” Mr Gregory said.
“It’s been over four months since we launched, and we’ve had less than 100 doctors that have gone through that step and said ‘remove me from your site’.
“Some of them have removed themselves, just in the last few weeks, because they’ve said to us ‘we’ve retired’, or ‘we’re moving back into the public [sector] space’.
“The amount of people that have been genuinely impacted in a negative way has been minute, and I think it speaks to the value that we’ve been providing.”
Currently there are approximately 14,500 non-GP specialists listed on the site.
Doctors can also request changes to any incorrect information on their profile, which Mr Gregory said gets actioned within 24 hours.
As for the reason that providers wanting to remove their listing have to provide a birth date: it’s to verify that the person requesting the profile removal is not a competitor looking to undercut a rival doctor’s online visibility.
The Zable website has an AHPRA integration which moderators can use to plug in a date of birth and confirm identity.
Mr Gregory also confirmed that Zable used generative AI, but said it was mostly to “gather information about a provider that has come from a hospital or a personal website … [which we then] aggregate to make it a little bit more palatable for a user”.
He also said that this was becoming less common as more doctors came forward requesting to be listed on the site.
“We had our official launch on the first of July – prior to that, the numbers were fairly small in terms of providers reaching out to us,” Mr Gregory said,
“Since then the growth rate has increased dramatically, and that’s because there’s a lot more awareness.
“We have got a lot of new private practice specialists or surgeons that see value in the service that we provide, so they’re the ones that are coming to us.”
Related
So what’s the issue?
The criticism does come in the context of a growing tension within the health sector when it comes to patient convenience.
The most controversial shake-ups to Australian healthcare since 2020 – from online-only telehealth clinics to pharmacist-led prescribing – have been made in the name of patient accessibility.
There are also valid questions as to whether the fees that a specialist charges are an accurate guide to the kind of doctor that they are.
It was not that long ago, for instance, that GPs were accused of rorting billions from Medicare each year.
When asked about the criticism of Zable in general and why someone might go to the effort of printing and anonymously mailing in a printout of an internet forum, Mr Gregory said it did not make sense to him.
“I think that they’re just protecting an old system, an opaque system that has benefited them,” he said.
“Bringing transparency to a system that has needed it, I think, has frustrated some people – which I expected, by the way.
“When you put patients first, which is what we do, we’re prepared to take some of that criticism.”
