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Comment by antorobin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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