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<h1>A tectonic shift in how people find, and meet with therapists, built on STEEM<h1>

***This is an open source proposal: I hereby relinquish any right to any perceived intellectual property in the content below. This is an idea that anyone is free to implement with or without my involvement or compensation.***

<h1>The Problems With The Therapeutic System</h1>

There are several problems I see when I look at the current system for finding and meeting with therapists first from the perspective of the patient/customer and second from the perspective of the therapist all of which I believe can be solved by leveraging a decentralized application framework like STEEM.

<h1>The Patient</h1>

1. Finding the therapist: How do you find a good one? How do you know they're right for you? How can you get closer to the ideal mix of quality, cost, and convenience? 
2. Meeting with them: Most therapy is still held in person, which makes perfect sense, but what if both the therapist and patient are open to either video chat or text chat or both?

<h1>The Therapist</h1>

1. Finding the patient: A therapist is just like any other service provider, they want to get as many customers as they can feasibly serve for a profit. Using the internet is the obvious answer, but the therapist's expertise is in treating patients not IT. The less time they can spend on this the more time they can spend doing what they do best: delivering therapy.
2. Payment: There is no situation where a vendor wouldn't benefit from a more efficient, quicker, automated payment system with lower transaction costs.

<h1>Introducing TherapyMatch</h1>

What follows is a mockup of a homepage for TherapyMatch which should give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, as well as give me a jumping-off point from which to elaborate on the unique value propositions such a platform could offer to every person involved with it.

https://storage.googleapis.com/steemimgimgs/2016/10/28/TherapyMatchShortea7ec.jpg

<h1>Steemit Clone?</h1>

As you can see, it's merely a modified version of the Steemit homepage. Obviously the concept does not *require* such a resemblance, but seeing as Steemit is open source this could shorten the development window and allow the developer to bring a minimum viable product (MVP) to market faster.

<h1>Customer-Facing</h1>

TherapyMatch would in many ways be two different companies, one serving the patient, one serving the therapist. More on this later, point being that the homepage is designed to be customer/patient-centric. It's where the individual goes to find a great therapist.

<h1>A Marketplace</h1>

In many ways this is a rather ordinary marketplace. Customers are able to sort vendors based on their category whether it's talk therapy, psychology, psychotherapy, etc. One could also build into the site some educational tools which help people pick which therapy is best suited for them, perhaps just by enabling them to learn a little bit more about the different disciplines.

<h1>Ratings and Reviews</h1>

Customers are also given an intuitive signal for the quality of the therapist using a mechanism most have become familiar with (and more are becoming familiar with every day) the star rating method. It's what Amazon does for products and vendors and what ZocDoc does for MDs.

There may be therapists who do not wish to be reviewed or rated. I will address this issue later, but suffice to say that I still see multiple unique value propositions (UVPs) for even these service providers, so this is not necessarily a hindrance to adoption.

<h1>Tags and Topics</h1>

I decided to leave the "Tags and Topics" from Steemit in the mockup for several reasons. First, this is just an initial mockup and isn't meant to be a fully polished and thought out product. That being said I think there may be something to this. Imagine you could not just find a great therapist, at a justifiable price, and meet with them very quickly, but also find a therapist who shares your interests? Imagine, for example, that if you are into cryptocurrenices you could find a therapist who also just happens to be into crypto in their spare time. And from the therapist's perspective: imagine being able to monetize your hobbies through your occupation? Currently that knowledge is largely wasted, at least from the perspective of remuneration.

<h1>Price, Discipline, Description</h1>

There are many elements in this mockup that are probably self-evident and so don't need thorough explanation:
1. The navbar at the top has quick-links to sub-pages for the individual disciples
2. High-performing vendors are promoted at the top of the page. This could also be potential real estate for therapists looking to advertise their services
1. There's a feed in addition to the vendors highlighted at the top for a more random assortment of vendors which also features the number of patient upvotes the therapist has received, the number of patient reviews they've received, as well as more room for a customizable description of the therapist's services

<h1>Therapist Profile</h1>

The next and final mockup is for the therapist's profile page which is a good way to illustrate the UVPs for the therapists using the platform.

https://storage.googleapis.com/steemimgimgs/2016/10/28/TherapyMatchProfileShort523ca.jpg

<h1>An Online Office For Therapists</h1>

Now we can start to see why even therapists who are not interested in being reviewed or rated could still benefit from using the platform. How many therapists have the technical sophistication to create a web portal that enables their clients to schedule meetings, choose their preferred meeting type (video chat, chat, or even a real world meeting) as well as facilitate the payment process? I see no reason why therapists shouldn't be given the opportunity to disable the ability to be reviewed or rated. This would hurt them as much as help them. The more common assumption when seeing that the therapist disabled this function would be to assume that the therapist has negative reviews. In this case, the platform, with respect to one such therapist, would become merely a web portal for their practice, but not a way of gaining new customers. But this is fine because it maximizes the number and type of therapists who can find utility in the platform.

By combining STEEM (or some other decentralized application framework) and existing clients (e.g. google hangouts) I think that implementing these functionalities would be relatively trivial.

<h1>Ratings and Reviews</h1>

While many may fear ratings and reviews, there's little reason to imagine that someone who expects or knows that they will be positively reviewed and rated will be fearful. In fact, TherapyMatch would enable such therapists (for example, therapists who already have a long list of dedicated patients) to monetize a previously un-monetizable aspect of their practice: the positive but subjective impressions of their patients.

<h1>Client Retention and Discovery</h1>

The therapist's profile is designed so that if therapists use it for existing clients it won't promote those clients leaving that therapist. This is necessary to get the therapists to use the platform. They won't use it in the first place if they're afraid their clients will use it to find someone else. 

That being said, all the client has to do to explore the market is click the "TherapyMatch" logo in the top left of the navbar. Making the marketplace just one click away serves the patient, but making it *only* one click away, as in the client must click one specific thing as opposed to having numerous opportunities and locations for navigating away from their therapist, serves the therapist's interests. Obviously this compromise can be tweaked to maximize the satisfaction of the two groups.

<h1>THE REAL INNOVATION</h1>

In the mockup you can see various other features the justification for which are likely whose self-evident. For example, the therapist should be able to upload their credentials as well as have them and their identity's verified. But to understand the real innovation behind this concept it is best to explore why such a platform doesn't exist already.

<h1>The Therapists</h1>

Most marketplaces like this are based around delivering the lowest *cost* service providers. Look at Uber. Sure they have a rating and review mechanism that helps make it a substantially better experience than old school taxis as well as an elastic pricing model which enables them to guarantee that a service provider is always available to their customer, but at the end of the day Uber is about delivering consistent, and consistently *low* prices to their customers. That works when the service being provided is more or less uniform, is not highly skilled, and doesn't demand a high educational investment. 

But therapists are different. There is a far wider variety in the types of services they provide as well as the cost. Why would a psychiatrist, someone who spent a fortune getting their MD use a platform that is designed to commoditize their skillset, a skillset by the way that likely cannot be commoditized? The answer is they wouldn't. Add to this that all existing platforms built on Internet 1.0 and 2.0 technologies collect fees which are deducted from the revenues of the worker (in this case the therapist). For these companies (e.g. Uber) the only sensible strategy is to put as much downward pressure on the cost of the services so as to attract as many customers as possible, limit the potential for competitors to undercut them which also limits the choices of their workers and enables the service provider to increase the cost of their services to their workers i.e. the percentage they collect from every transaction.

According to this article, the average therapist makes between $75 and $150 per hour. So let's say you're an average therapist who makes around $100 per hour. Further let's assume that you have enough clients to run your practice profitably and your practice is growing. You have no reason to use a platform that threatens to lower the price of your services *especially if that service is going to take a fee*. 

There are several reasons why the therapist still has much to gain from using TherapyMatch or an app like it, for example, they can still use it as a straightforward web portal through which existing clients can interact with them cheaply and efficiently, but the more interesting reasons have to do with the underlying framework on which the platform would be built.

<h1>The Developer Incentives</h1>

Shifting from a centralized corporate application to a decentralized application requires a complete rethinking of the incentives at play. The ideal structure would be very similar to Steemit, this is precisely why I think that Steem would be an ideal platform for this dApp (decentralized application). That being said, my technical expertise in the platform is not sufficient to say whether that means that Steem itself should be used as opposed to a Steem clone or sidechain. I would welcome any help from someone with a more sophisticated understanding of the technology in more thoroughly hashing out this concept.

<h1>Developer Equity</h1>

One of the most impressive innovations of Steem is the ability to create crypto-equity vehicles like Steem Power. The ideal scenario would be for the developers to get paid mainly through equity (e.g. something called TherapyMatch Cryptoshares which would be more or less identical to Steem Power), that way their incentive is to make the platform as valuable as possible for the long term as opposed to pushing down wages, jacking up their percentage, and generally commoditizing the labor of the people they are claiming to represent. 

They would also be incentivized to minimize their role in the management and instead focus on automating management (to decrease their work load) as opposed to inflating the need for them as an intermediary to justify their fee. If the developer is paid in equity they are incentivized to remove themselves from the equation as much as possible so as to maximize the value it delivers to the therapists and patients which would then maximize the value of the overall enterprise *and consequently the value of their equity*.

<h1>Therapist Equity</h1>

As the therapist is the most important component of the enterprise they too should be able to earn equity. One possible implementation of this might be to reward them with equity in direct proportion to the amount of capital they push through the platform. Imagine, for example, that the platform has something akin to (or identical to) Steem Dollars which enables the therapist to charge their clients quickly, efficiently, and automatically with very low transaction costs. The more payments the therapist receives through the platform the more demand they create for the underlying commodity that backs the transactions (in the case of Steemit it's STEEM) which increases its value.

Rewarding the therapist with a certain amount of equity that was in direct proportion to the amount of demand they created for the underlying crypto would incentivize them to continue this beneficial behavior as well as provide them with a longer term stake in the platform which would incentivize them to promote it, improve it, etc. Just like Steem Power, this system would reward the therapists who benefit the platform the most.

<h1>Why Not Patient Equity?!</h1>

The patient is also vital to the platform and there's no reason why they shouldn't also receive some equity in it, again in direct proportion to the amount of value they add to the platform (how this would be determined is certainly an interesting problem, but not an especially hard one). What if their reviews are especially good, or they're an especially heavy user of the platform? Rewarding them with equity, if done properly, could incentivize them to continue using the platform, help improve it, *and help promote it.*

<h1>More Traditional Compensation For Developers</h1>

None of this is to say that the developers couldn't leverage more traditional means of delivering value and receiving compensation, though the nature of the enterprise welcomes some interesting variations. For example, imagine that the site also had a forum akin to (or identical to) Steemit which allowed patients and therapists to make feature suggestions or attach bounties for the potential developers (e.g. $10,000 upon the completion of feature X which helps therapists and/or patients). 

The developers would be able to pick and choose their projects based on whether they believe the capital at play was sufficient to meet the value of their time, while the risk of wasting their time building out a product that no one wanted (and wasting company resources) would be minimized because the feature suggestions would be coming directly from the customer.

<h1>In Conclusion</h1>

Needless to say this is a complicated idea, but one that has a lot of potential much of which is not limited just to the proposed platform. Such a platform could be easily adapted to various other fields (a version of the site could be used for manual laborers like plumbers and electricians or medical professionals) rather quickly so that the developers would be able to monetize it further, a process which would even benefit the existing users of the platform assuming the underlying crypto-assets were the same and, assuming this was all built on STEEM, ***all the holders of STEEM POWER as well!***

<h1>This is an Open Source Idea</h1>

As I wrote at the beginning of the article I hereby relinquish any right to this idea. I have no intention of creating a company based on it and I certainly have no right to any of the information or intellectual property in this article. I believe this to be a good idea that I hope someone else will run with or simply use as a jumping-off point to create something else. This article is merely a thought exercise that was inspired by a friend last night when said friend pointed out to me that they were proud of themselves for realizing they were stressed and then quickly reacted by scheduling a session with their therapist. 

When they added that the session wouldn't be till next week my mind immediately started thinking about how we could narrow that time frame down. Why couldn't she see someone tomorrow, or maybe even the same day? I wound up being unable to sleep and so spent the time from 1 AM to 3 AM on the mockups you looked at earlier. 

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