Two heads are better than one....even if they are doctors.

I remember getting help with my homework in high school would usually involve the time consuming process of scrolling through my phone book and calling up friends one by one until I could finally get someone who could actually solve that impossible math question (which was no easy task coming from an Arts background – almost everyone I knew was bad at math).

This was before social media came along and turned my life upside down - in a good way. Now all I need to do is to log in to all my social media accounts and fire my question away.

From personal experience, someone out there in the social media sphere will always have the answer.

Which is why I am excited about Doximity. Although not terribly original (it's conceptionally essentially a Facebook for physicians), Doximity brings doctors together in a secure network where they can seek and share professional medical advice that would ultimately benefit their patients.

To help you better understand better, here's an explanation from Mashable that illustrates how this would work in real life:

"A doctor in California, for instance, has a teenage patient who recently came down with an uncommon infection, so he contacted another doctor in Texas who had led studies on a treatment for that infection. Another specialist from Boston chimed in, and together the three came up with a new way to treat the patient."

Wait, you might ask, does this mean that my medical records are floating around somewhere in cyberspace?

Before you start panicking about the potential infringement of your privacy, rest assured that every effort is made to ensure that your medical information are only available to medical professionals. Doximity has a three-step verification process for doctors to establish a profile on the site that involves a credit check and a verification of credentials against the American Medical Association database. As a second layer of security, there is also a multiple-step sign-in process similar to one you may have encountered at your bank’s website.

This high degree of security not only ensures that your medical records are kept (relatively) private; they allow doctors to exchange information openly and freely, legally.

With an estimate over 30,000 US physicians already in the network (considering the site’s pretty new, this number is just going to increase over time), it would now be a piece of cake for my physician to seek a second (and even third, fourth, fifth, etc) opinion for a diagnosis.

For a person who strongly believes in the saying ‘two heads are better than one’, I think this is wonderful news.