DoctorUna to help make patients click with doctors

The Life: DoctorUna, a new website, removes the hassle of scheduling appointments for doctors and patients.

Yaasen Dalal, the chief executive of DoctorUna, which caters to both the doctor and the patient. Sarah Dea / The National

Yaasen Dalal, the chief executive of DoctorUna, explains how the firm he founded is making life easier for both doctors and patients in the UAE with an online appointment booking system.

Where did the idea of this business come from?

When you move to Dubai or the region, it's incredibly hard to figure out who the right doctors are. It's also incredibly frustrating to try and get through to a receptionist - the lines are always busy - and to try and get an appointment that suits you. Especially, with many people, it's hard to call up during office hours. The whole thing is just very, very difficult. That's really where it came from.

How does it work?

It's a two-sided problem we are solving. From a doctor's perspective, they just want to provide care. They spend a lot of time training to help people, they are not in the business of marketing. On top of that, they manage quite a complex schedule. They often have a lot of vacancies, no-shows, cancellations and that's obviously very inefficient for them. What we are able to do is better manage their appointment scheduling system. We help reduce no-shows as well as bring them more patients who don't know about them. We help make their practice more efficient because people can make appointments outside office hours. We are already finding that 40 per cent of our patients are using the service outside of office hours. We [send] a sequence of SMSs and emails, so that reminds patients who may have forgotten. We make it easy to reschedule by a click on a link. We are fully bilingual in English and Arabic. We are finding half use the English website and half use the Arabic website.

Do people like the service you're offering?

So far, we've got 190 doctors and clinics signed up, and tens of appointments are being made every day. We are already finding that doctors are encouraging their existing patients to use the service. Doctors' response has been so fantastic. They are coming to us and saying it's brilliant, this really helps us, it's really valuable for us. And that is really gratifying.

How do you make money from this?

We charge doctors a flat annual fee of Dh6,500 (US$1,769). In return, the doctor also gets world-class online marketing. We know how to present their profile in a way that helps patients. More than that, the return on investment is more or less one extra appointment per month. So if we deliver more than one extra appointment to a doctor per month, he is already making a return on his investment. We are already seeing doctors who have signed up getting many multiples of that one appointment per month.

Do you have expansion plans for the company?

We have 15 employees, but the number one thing going on at the minute is recruiting. We are on a big geographic expansion right now. We are rolling out to the rest of the Middle East. First, the rest of the UAE outside Dubai. Then Cairo and Amman in Jordan. Then we are rolling out through the rest of the GCC with Beirut, Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Turkey. By this time next year, we should be in a position to be able to cover the Mena region entirely. We are rolling out by speciality as well. We started with dentists, GPs, paediatricians, obstetricians and gynaecologists.