Internet Medicine

Posted by tomo at 02:30 AM in science . | 4 Comments

News: People are using online medical consultation. It's becoming more convenient to talk to your doc online with off the shelf software packages and more convenient for doctors to bill you, with the American Medical Association taking care of some of the red tape involved in getting online consultations covered by insurance. In addition to your regular doctor there are also many medical experts online waiting for your questions for a small fee, who you can use as your own personal medical librarian. Generally, you can either pay a price per question or pay a set price and ask as many questions as you want for some period of time. Questions can be asked over email, over the phone, or through chat.

But who would know whether your questions were being answered by an American or a foreigner? After all, the public is mostly unaware of how much medical transcription work is outsourced. I don't think these businesses are yet big enough to be offshoring, but what's stopping them? Like answers.google.com but for medical questions, anybody with the knowledge to answer a question to the asker's satisfaction gets paid in US dollars, which may have much more buying power where they live. Of course, a phone call would give away most people's location. It may be too costly to bother training the run-of-the-mill offshore call center workers in the American accent, but health consulting could be much more lucrative and therefore worth training people to speak Midwestern American.

I think I will have to move to another country and either answer questions for American cash or teach American accents. The latter could be especially attractive to those linguists with no real employment options. Who wants to move to the Philippines?