Telegram bot that will get answers from real doctors | Hacker News Reader

Telegram bot that will get answers from real doctors

icliniq.com

50 pointsantorobin38 comments

The licensing boards are going to burn you to the ground. Even if you're based somewhere out of reach, they'll block payment processing or freeze your accounts.

Your doctor directory makes no reference at all to where they are licensed to practice medicine more specifically than a country. There's no way you're going to get a pass on this.

Well. Guess you are specifically talking about USA.

We have users across 160 countries and we CLEARLY say we are a second opinion platform. Our doctors are licensed to practise in their respective geographies.

We get the best of doctors from each country to answer questions. This is another reason why icliniq is the most cost effective second opinion platform in the world.

We are able to leverage the best of doctors across borders for cost benefits. That's what we specialise in. Imagine asking a radiology opinion less than $20. :) We do that.

Lot of Americans goto Costa Rica and other countries for their surgical procedures because of the cost benefits and the same quality of medical treatment.

Cuba is supposed to be one of the best in the world for Eye surgeries. Lot of people from other countries go there.

We want to replicate this to the online space. :)

This will be dangerous for you to operate in the United States.

Offering what you call medical advice without so much mentioning HIPAA? I hope you don't get hacked - penalties here for a breach are much higher than you'd expect, and you should be thinking about that if you're going to accept money from Americans in exchange for your services.

Thank you for your concern. Well. We have taken the best of security practises to avoid being hacked and we continuously upgrade our infrastructure to HIPAA standards.

BEWARE: do NOT add random Telegram bots to your groups!!!

Some bots copy the phone numbers of the users and add them to spam lists. So do not get surprised if you get spam messages in your telegram from Russian phone numbers offering fake glasses or home made soda (yeah that happened to me!)

This stuff just started -- no one is controlling it. I have no idea how to report this. Blocking offenders doesn't do any good after your number is on spam list. Hopefully, they do something about it.

Hi Smirnoff, Telegram bots are designed to run within a limited environment.

Bots do not get access to phone number or anything such. Read more here -->

https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution

https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

This is from Telegram Bot FAQ -->The bots can receive:

- Service messages (people added or removed from the group, etc.)

And that's with Privacy Mode activated!

Btw by default, we have made our bot in such a way that one cannot add it to any group. :) Its completely personal with anyone who adds @icliniqbot from his telegram app.

Proper Telegram Bots (https://core.telegram.org/bots/) don't have access to your phone number.

Maybe you added an account (that did not end in @xxxxbot) that was running on a custom backend.

That could have been the case. A friend of mine kept adding lots of bots to the group until several of us started getting random spam messages the next day.

How is @xxxbot enforced? I see in that article they have an official "BotFather" which doesnt seem to follow that rule.

When you register a bot it has to end in ...bot, so any account that pretends to be one is easy to spot.

It is so terrible that all these services use phone numbers for ID. Couldn't they do some UUIDish thing instead?

Hi anc84, exactly it uses the UUIDish thing, not the other way around :)

Oh nice, so Telegram does not use phone numbers at all? That is good to hear (still never gonna use it as I want the full stack FOSS :} )!

Hi Guys, I am Dhruv, founder of icliniq.com. We already have three modes of accessing a doctor on icliniq viz. query, doctor call back and video consultation. And its exciting to say that we have solved 100,000 health issues for users across 160 countries.

With all the above happening, we were thinking of making an iOS app for icliniq. That's when we came across the fact that a normal person has 27 apps on his/her phone. But he/she would only 4-5 apps most of the time.And another 5-6 apps periodically. The most used apps would be IM apps or social network apps. So how do we make ourselves available on the most used app was our thought? We also wanted to be seamless. And that answer was icliniq on telegram with icliniq bot. Simply because telegram had wonderful API's to make it seamless. :)

We also got listed on product hunt --> http://www.producthunt.com/tech/icliniq-on-telegram

I suggest you hire a native English speaker to write and edit the copy on your site. There are numerous grammatical issues that instantly reduce your credibility. Just to name a couple:

"Find best Online Doctors to get instant medical advice and second opinion for your health problems." <-- Reads like spambot copy

"Talk with a Doctor on Phone." <-- Try "Phone a Doctor" or "Talk with a Doctor on the Phone."

"Subscribe a plan & Get Unlimited Medical Advice." <-- This is how my technophobe mother would text-message "Subscribe to a plan and get unlimited medical advice."

"Helping over 1000's of users everyday" <-- "over 1000's"? Does that mean several thousands? Or just more than 1,000?

Thank you very much. :) It looks like you have gone through our site in detail. We appreciate your feedback. Coming from a person like you who has written two books, we understand how lucid a content has to be.

We shall hire a content specialist. Can you suggest anyone?

Hi. Do you plan to add a "per query" pricing plan ? I would be happy to use such a service from times to times but I don't think I'd subscribe for a monthly plan.

Hi pol0nium,

The service has both subscription and per-query pricing plans as well.

Once you post a query you get the payment link for the query.

Subscription plan is easier to access the bot for unlimited answers. so we added the "subscribe" menu in the bot itself.

You should put per-query pricing on the site if you offer it - can't find info on that anywhere

We will update it in the website shortly. Thank you for the feedback

Thanks for the answer.

Hi, I'm the developer of this telegram bot.

This will work like a health assistant in your pocket. And make it super easy to get expert medical advice from real doctors of icliniq

I'm looking for your comments.

Hi, why did you choose a Telegram bot and not other popular chat platforms?

Hi codewithcheese, Telegram is known for it's security, so we started our first build on it.

Telegram is known for having dodgy security:

http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-bac...

We actually wanted to develop on whatsapp. Whatsapp does not provide API's as rich as telegram. Further we wanted the telegram bot to be another way to use icliniq.com, our flagship portal. :)

Is it HIPAA compliant?

Well. All our processes are HIPAA compliant but we do not have a certification yet.We are working on it :) As of now we are a second opinion platform globally with users across 160 countries.

So that's a no, then?

There's no such thing as a HIPAA certification so, if their plan is to get one, it's safe to assume that they don't have the expertise to create the appropriate security infrastructure

While this makes the service seem shady, it may still be a useful stopgap in countries where medical care is sub standard. How many people do you know that are afraid to go to a doctor because of a possible 40k bill? I bet large sums of them would pay $10 to have at least some level of care or information about what to do next.

This could go bad, fast, leading to deaths, or it could be run well, and save lives. It will likely do a bit of both. There doesn't appear to be any oversight with diagnoses, and the model leads itself to call center style " read the script" answers by people who are not doctors, akin to farming code. If they can combat that, then they may just have something that solves the bloated and entrenched medical industries strangle hold on health as a buisness.

You have clearly captured the situation. At icliniq, quality matters to us. Every doctor who registers at icliniq is stringently verified. And more than verification, we check every answer of a doctor with in an in-house moderation team. Before a doctor is allowed to answer real health queries, we give them simulated queries to know their quality. If they do not answer it well, we block them from answering any queries. Period.

You can check our quality of our answers here ---> https://www.icliniq.com/qa/medical-questions-answers

We acknowledge the fact there is no HIPAA certification. By certification, Marshal has meant that our developers need to get certification from a reputed training centre. (Although there are no Govt standards for testing). ----> https://www.truevault.com/blog/should-app-developers-get-hip...

Cool idea!

Typo on the homepage: Unlimitted -> Unlimited

Hi Bill, Corrected now :)

Thanks for checking us.

Is there a relationship that gets built between patient and doctor? Or do you start fresh every time?

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