New website helps people find a family doctor in Brampton
Published December 28, 2023 at 3:27 pm
After his family doctor retired, Brampton resident Paul Dhillon struggled to find a new one.
That’s why Dhillon, an independent IT consultant, decided to create a website, Find My Doctor, to help people find a doctor more easily.
“I personally have really struggled to find a family doctor,” Dhillon tells inBrampton.
For a while, he went to walk-in clinics but found the experience impersonal. And he says friends and family members have also had difficulty finding a doctor.
“These are the same challenges faced by people that I know, like family members and friends.”
In fact, more than one in five Canadians — an estimated 6.5 million people — do not have a family physician or nurse practitioner they see regularly, according to a 2023 survey published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
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There is an Ontario resource called Health Care Connect. This government website allows people looking for a doctor to register and then connects them with a healthcare provider if one is located in their area.
But Dhillon thought with a background in IT and running his company Neural Engine Corp., he could create a website that avoids that waiting process and allows people to contact doctors on their own.
Both resources are useful.
“Their (Health Care Connect) intentions are the same as mine, which is to help people find a doctor,” Dhillon says.
Find My Doctor is map-based, so when people log on, they are given the option to enter their address, or look at a map with all the doctors accepting patients.
Find My Doctor is a map-based tool to find doctors accepting patients.
Currently, the map is Brampton but Dhillon plans to expand to Mississauga, Toronto and beyond in the future.
He collected information online or contacted doctors to create the map of doctors currently accepting patients. Included on each point in the map is the doctor’s sex, address, contact information and any languages they might speak.
Dhillon has a process to refresh the information on the map, at certain points at certain intervals throughout the year, to keep it up to date. New doctors move into the area and others retire or are no longer able to accept new patients.
Currently, Dhillon is funding the website and plans to keep it free for the public to use. Eventually, he would like to add paid advertising on the site to help fund it.
The website has already helped Dhillon, and some of his family members find a doctor.
For more information, see findmydoctor.ca.
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