Question 1

What is My Doctor Friend?

Accepted Answer

My Doctor Friend is your family's health copilot, designed to help you navigate health issues and questions for yourself and your loved ones. You can create separate profiles for each family member to keep everyone's health information organized. Unlike a simple symptom checker or search engine, it asks thoughtful follow-up questions, provides personalized health information, helps track symptoms over time for each family member, assists with understanding medical test results, and guides you in preparing for doctor visits. While it cannot diagnose or treat medical conditions, it empowers you with knowledge to have more informed conversations with your healthcare providers and make better health decisions for your whole family.

Question 2

I'm already a paid member. Will the new plans change my price?

Accepted Answer

No. New plans are for new members, and your plan and your price are unchanged. You keep renewing at what you pay today, your data stays exactly as it is, and a couple of your allowances actually increase. No action is needed.

Question 3

Is My Doctor Friend an AI doctor?

Accepted Answer

No. My Doctor Friend's mission is to empower people to better understand and nurture their health, not to replace doctors. We believe AI will improve healthcare and enhance the capabilities of both clinicians and non-clinicians. However, AI has real limitations: limited memory and context understanding, inability to perform physical examinations, cannot order diagnostic testing, and cannot prescribe medications or perform medical procedures. For these reasons, My Doctor Friend does not and cannot provide a medical diagnosis or treatment. You should always consult a licensed healthcare professional for health questions or concerns.

Question 4

What can I use My Doctor Friend for?

Accepted Answer

My Doctor Friend supports you throughout your entire health journey, for yourself and loved ones. Use it for understanding new health issues, healthcare navigation (figuring out where to seek care and what to expect), symptom monitoring and tracking over time, doctor visit preparation, answering general health questions, test result interpretation, and understanding treatment options and medications. It is more than a one-time symptom checker. It is a continuous health partner that helps you stay organized, informed, and in control of your family's healthcare.

Question 5

Can my family help manage a profile?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Profile sharing lets you invite family members to a profile by email, so everyone helping with someone's care sees the same picture: the conversations, health information, files, and monitoring. Each person joins with their own free account, questions are labeled with the asker's name, a profile can include up to 10 people, and you can remove someone's access at any time. Sharing a profile is a premium feature. The people you invite can view the profile for free. Chatting about it depends on their own plan.

Question 6

Why does My Doctor Friend ask me so many questions?

Accepted Answer

My Doctor Friend is designed to be thorough to provide the most personalized and safe information possible. AI models are far better at providing answers than asking the right questions. Without proper context, AI can give misleading or dangerous advice. For example, someone asking about indigestion without mentioning heart disease risk factors might receive antacid suggestions when symptoms could indicate a heart attack. The follow-up questions are safety filters designed to prevent context drift, avoid dangerous assumptions, and ensure the information is relevant to your specific situation.

Question 7

How many AI models answer my questions?

Accepted Answer

Usually three. When you ask a health question, three AI models typically work on it together and check each other's work. Which models we use, and how many, depends on your question, your membership plan, and other factors. For example, a quick hello doesn't need the full check.

Question 8

Is it safe for me to share my health information with My Doctor Friend?

Accepted Answer

My Doctor Friend works with health information in two ways. When we process information on behalf of a healthcare provider or other covered entity, we do so as a HIPAA business associate under a signed Business Associate Agreement, and we are HIPAA compliant for that information. When you use the product on your own, outside of a provider relationship, that information generally falls under FTC and state privacy law rather than HIPAA. In those cases we are not acting as a business associate, but we apply the same HIPAA-grade safeguards, including encryption, access controls, and agreements with our service providers, across the entire product.

Question 9

What does it mean that My Doctor Friend is HIPAA-compliant?

Accepted Answer

It depends on how your information reaches us. When My Doctor Friend handles health information on behalf of a healthcare provider, we act as that provider's business associate under a signed Business Associate Agreement and are HIPAA compliant for that information. When you use My Doctor Friend on your own, HIPAA generally does not apply, because we are not acting as a business associate. Even then, we hold ourselves to the same HIPAA-grade safeguards across the product: Business Associate Agreements with our AI, database, and hosting providers; strict access controls; encryption in transit and at rest; and contractual limits that prohibit our service providers from using your data for their own purposes. This is fundamentally different from using a service like ChatGPT directly, where your health information goes to the AI company without these protections.

Question 10

Is My Doctor Friend really free to use?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can start free and stay free. The free plan includes 10 messages a month with voice included, your own health profile, 5 document uploads a day, monitoring, reminders, wearables, and the free Second Opinion models. Memberships with unlimited messages start at $20 a month. See the pricing page for the full comparison.

Question 11

What about AI's impact on the environment and society?

Accepted Answer

We recognize the tension. The data centers that power AI use a lot of energy, which is hard on the environment, and the social implications of this technology are difficult too. We keep building because few things are more important than human health, and AI can meet critical needs that traditional healthcare has never been able to meet, because of how it's resourced and what it costs. We don't yet offset the environmental impact of our work, but we aim to as we grow.

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