How To Find A Doctor Wherever You Are.

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization.

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Ben Greenfield (0:29)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and health insurance and finding doctors are something that I have to admit are kind of fresh on my mind.

About the past decade, I've used a health savings account or what's also known as an HSA here in America, for you listeners in the USA, and I've combined that with managing my own high-deductible health insurance when the Obamacare Affordable Health Care Act got passed, that for several reasons, which you can read about in the show notes if you want to, basically, it ironically tripled my private health insurance costs and left me forced to find a new plan. So, I've spent the past several months kind of going through the Washington Health Plan Finder here in my local state and enduring everything from tech support nightmares to nerve-wracking lapses in my health insurance coverage. And fortunately, I now have health insurance, and I'm good to go on that front. And as far as finding a physician, I've certainly interviewed in previous podcasts my own physicians on this show, like Dr. Todd Schlappfer, the naturopathic physician who I work with over in Coeur d'Alene, and Dr. Toby Hallowitz, the Chinese medical practitioner who does a lot of my medical care in the Spokane Valley. And I've also talked about websites like primaldocs.com or the paleophysiciansnetwork.com or functionalmedicine.org that I've recommended in the past for helping to find a good functional medicine or naturopathic medical practitioner in your area. But a few months ago, I was actually over in Utah, skiing, and I met at a convention that I was at, this guy named Ari Tola, who I have on the call today. And Ari was telling me about an app that he's created along with a website that helps people not only find physicians, but also find specific medical procedures, insurance, medical practitioners, doctor ratings, and all sorts of interesting things when it comes to this process of kind of navigating your way through the modern medical care system. So the name of his website is betterdoctor.com, betterdoctor.com.

And we're going to jump in today and talk about what that is and how you can use it to do things like find health insurance or find a specific procedure or find a medical practitioner who's appropriate for your needs. So Ari, thanks for coming on, man.

Ari Tulla (3:14)

Hey, thank you, Ben. Great intro.

Ben Greenfield (3:16)

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I tend to drone on for a long time on those things. So it was usually I just either wait until my guest completely interrupts me or just kind of go until I feel like being done. So hopefully it wasn't wasn't too long for you.

So I'm curious if you can share with us because I actually didn't really get a good grasp of this when I was talking with you in Utah. How exactly did this website come about? Was this a personal frustration that you experienced or just a good tech idea that you had?

Ari Tulla (3:47)

Yeah, I think I'm like many of the other health care entrepreneurs who come outside the health care where I had a personal vendetta on. On making and creating something better. So my medical story started 15 years ago. My wife became ill in Europe and was seven years ago when we moved to California. I had a cold bladed insurance plan. I had access to every doctor I can think of, but we couldn't find the right one. Nobody could help us. We talked to the insurance company, HR department and the rest, and they couldn't really give us guidance. And after seeing about 30 doctors and finally finding the one who was able to help us, kind of idea stuck in my mind that this is something very complicated. This is something that most people will never do. We had the tenacity. We had the capacity to do it.

And that started the idea of thinking. And about a couple of years later, I then jumped out of my previous post and started the company with my co-founder Tapio Tolvalen.

And the idea really is to help people find the right doctor when they need one.

Ben Greenfield (4:56)

Okay, gotcha. So as far as how this actually flushes itself out, did you guys wind up creating a website first? Did you create an app first? Or what was the actual process at that point?