Online medical inquiry platform accepts Bitcoin to protect patient privacy and makes users comfortable when asking health-related questions.
Ask The Doctor, a Canadian medical startup has officially announced that they are now accepting Bitcoin on their platform to pay for their services through BitPay. The main reason for this is to increase customer privacy using Bitcoin’s anonymity benefits that credit cards cannot offer.
More privacy
The company’s goal is to allow users to have more confidence when asking questions that they do not wish anyone else to know or are embarrassing. The service itself lets users send questions to experts and receive fast replies without having to speak with a family doctor.
Prakash Chand, CEO of Ask The Doctor
said:
“Many of our users ask extremely sensitive questions from teenage pregnancy to STD's to drug use that they are too afraid to go to their own doctor's office to get help for. On top of that, many users don't want their family members to know. While it does take some extra effort to have complete anonymity using Bitcoin, it's certainly a large improvement over a credit card.”
According to the company, they are already accepting PayPal and Credit Card which lacks the privacy benefits. In addition, they will be launching the Bitcoin option on its mobile app later this month.
Bitcoin in the health sector
Bitcoin itself has been considered for use by medical institutions and so far, Ask The Doctor is using Bitcoin’s more anonymous way of paying to its advantage. However, Canadian healthcare using Bitcoin is new, but with Ask The Doctor joining this payment option trend, others might follow.
The North American health sector itself has started to explore Blockchain-based technologies and Canada is already embracing Bitcoin as a form of payment. Furthermore, companies such as Factom and BitMD have already introduced their ways of implementing Blockchain into healthcare with
databases and
Bitcoin PoS terminals in the US.
Peter Klamka, CEO of Bitcoin Brands Inc. (BitMD)
stated:
“While Bitcoin is not anonymous, it can be completely private when purchasing anything including medical services.”
Even though Bitcoin transactions are all displayed on the Blockchain, it still offers more privacy than Credit Cards or PayPal which will have access to all medical payments through their services.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/online-platform-ask-the-doctor-adds-bitcoin-to-payment-options-to-protect-privacy
