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Comment by conroy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge fan of Watsi, but looking over their transparency document has me worried. The funds for 47% of funded treatments haven't made it to their medical partners. On average, the unsent funds have been waiting for 43 days, with the longest wait being 160 days (!!). I'd love if someone from Watsi could explain why it takes so long to send funds to medical partners after successful funding.

    Funded treatments: 261
    Treatments waiting for funds to transfer: 124
    Average wait for funds: 43 days

Data and script for calculations can be found here: https://gist.github.com/kyleconroy/5332776

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We go into detail about that in our FAQ here: https://watsi.org/faq#why-doesn-t-watsi-transfer-funds-befor...

But in short, it's for two reasons. 1) We transfer funds after care is provided (details in the FAQ) and 2) It takes an average of six weeks for care to be provided, which IMO is actually extremely fast considering the context in which our medical partners operate.

If you still have questions after reading the FAQ and associated blog post, happy to answer them here. That said, I really appreciate the analysis of our transparency doc. Crowdsourcing operational feedback is exactly why we make our data public.

What if a patient requires additional treatment?

Great question. We typically fund treatments that are likely to be curative, so we haven't dealt with this yet. But in the event that a patient's condition isn't fully resolved through treatment, we'd let the donors know, and if the Medical Partner felt it was appropriate to re-submit the patient to Watsi for funding of follow-up care, we certainly wouldn't be against it.

Chase, thanks for the reply. It makes perfect sense that your providers would perform the treatment before getting your funds, as you operate as an (almost) insurance provider. I was worried they were waiting for funds to proceed, but it's obvious that is not the case.

The only other thing that stuck out looking over the document were patient updates. There are a few patients, specifically Madeline[1], whose treatment is still in progress but haven't seen an update in over five months. It would be great if you could ensure that no patient would go without an update for more than two months.

[1]: http://eepurl.com/p25Jb

We do our best to make sure no patient goes without an update for too long, but are a bit constrained by our operational capacity right now (part of the reason we're fundraising).

In Madeline's case, the surgery is taking longer than anticipated because she had some unanticipated dental issues that her doctors wanted to take care of before they operated.

Because of limited resources, we usually prioritize sending "final" updates over "preliminary" ones, but you're right that in Madeline's case we definitely need to prioritize keeping her donors posted on the reason for the delay.

As Chase mentioned, this kind of crowdsourced spot checking is exactly why we make all of our records public. Thanks for bringing this up!

No problem Grace, thanks for the update. I don't want to come off as negative, I love what Watsi is doing and wish you best.

No worries! Not at all. Thanks again :)

Hi, Adam, I am in Myanmar, a developing country with a large audience who desperately need help for health care. Let me know if there is anything I can help to bring Watsi to Myanmar.

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