SpectrumScores Launches to Connect LGBTQ+ Patients, Doctors
Penn Med students build platform to address LGBTQ+ health disparities
Finding the right doctor can be hard. This difficulty is compounded for LGBTQ+ people, who often struggle to find doctors who can understand and empathasize with health problems specific to the community.
That’s why Phil Williams, Naveen Jain, and Jun Jeon — classmates at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania — launched SpectrumScores, a web-based platform to connect LGBTQ+ patients to LGBTQ+ competent doctors. The launch occurred on Wednesday, October 11th— in celebration of National Coming Out Day— and SpectrumScores is now availabile in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.
SpectrumScores offers a ranking and review system for healthcare providers on the basis of their LGBTQ+ competence and friendliness.
It uses 4 metrics — providing a welcoming environment, inclusive processes, LGBTQ+ specific knowledge, and overall satisfaction — to identify a single “SpectrumScore” for physicians.
This SpectrumScore — along with the text review system — helps LGBTQ+ patients identify the best healthcare provider for them.
A Penn Founder Story
When Phil, Naveen, and Jun formed at team as part of Penn HealthX Labs startup incubator, they began brainstorming medical products and prioritizing them based on their go-to-market potential.
Phil, Naveen, and Jun talked through several ideas. A home uranalysis kit, adjustable blood pressure cuff, and bacteriophage engineering to combat antibiotic resistance.
But these ideas weren’t quite what the trio was looking for. As Jeon reported, “We all collectively realized that those ideas weren’t reflective of what we were most passionate about, and they all kind of fizzled out.”
They didn’t just want to create an innovative product.
They wanted spark. They wanted passion. They wanted to create something that would change the world for the better.
Choose a Problem, Not a Product
At this crossroads, Phil, Naveen, and Jun sought advice from a personal friend and mentor of theirs, Dr. Katherine Choi.
Katherine advised the 3 co-founders to brainstorm a problem they were passionate about solving, not a product they were passionate about building. That’s how SpectrumScores came to be.
The Problem: LGBTQ+ Health Disparities
70% of transgender individuals and over 50% of LGBTQ+ people report having faced discrimination in a healthcare setting. When Phil, Naveen, and Jun learned about this disparity in a medical school course, they knew it was the problem they were meant to solve.
As Naveen Jain recalls, “ We were a bit hesitant to try to tackle such a huge problem like LGBTQ+ health, but we’d all experienced the negative impact of the lack of access to LGBTQ+ competent providers either personally or through close friends and family. We were determined to do our part to solve this problem.”
As such, the trio began conducting their own research to better understand how to solve LGBTQ+ health disparities.
When their research showed that 68% of LGBTQ+ Philadelphians had difficulty finding an LGBTQ+ competent physician, the SpectrumScores platform became clear to them.
As Williams puts it, “it wasn’t that LGBTQ+ competent physicians don’t exist but that — until SpectrumScorees — there was no way for LGBTQ+ patients to find them.”
In fact, LGBTQ+ populations in major cities like Philadelphia and New York had created Facebook groups in an attempt to collect informal recommendations for LGBTQ+ competent physicians. While Facebook groups were clearly an untenable solution, they highlighted to the SpectrumScores team the need for a formal platform to connect LGBTQ+ patients to the best physicians for them.
Launch and Vision
While the apropos launch on National Coming Out Day is limited to a web application in 4 cities, SpectrumScores plans to expand nationally and add a mobile application to more effectively reach a larger portion of the LGBTQ+ population.
Additionally, SpectrumScores hopes to eventually consider formalizing an LGBTQ+ competence certification for physicians to help train healthcare providers on providing the best care for LGBTQ+ patients.
When asked if they are concerned that Yelp or ZocDoc could build a SpectrumScore of their own, Williams pointed out, “They could. And they should. Our goal here is social impact. If partnering will more effectively address the problem of LGBTQ+ healthcare disparties, we are more than happy to build a partnership.”
As the co-founders see it, the long-term goal is to change the healthcare landscape so that LGBTQ+ patients can find doctors without worrying about discrimination based on their identity.
Check out the SpectrumScores platform here.
