AskHer

Problem

Many women struggle to find healthcare professionals that deeply empathise with their reproductive health issues and offer quality solutions. Women have taken to informal online communities to seek help from other women to find better doctors and understand their health issues, because existing solutions aren’t good enough.

It also does not help that women’s health issues are taboo until women are married. Worse, there is low visibility of the scale of the problem, because women despite comprising ~50% of the population aren’t prioritised.

Solution

The team has thus built a comprehensive online platform (“AskHer”) that provides verified women reviews on private clinics, and well-written content that empowers women to truly take control of their reproductive health. Through AskHer, we want to make information on women’s health and women’s healthcare providers more accessible, transparent, and useful for women in Singapore. 

What makes AskHer different from existing solutions?

• A potential integration with Singpass and our Health Appointment System (HAS) means that we are able to verify that reviews are written by real individuals, while still being able to keep their identities hidden. This will encourage users to leave more genuine and helpful reviews. 

• Compared to existing private sector solutions, AskHer is a government-run solution which offers greater objectivity. Absence of the profit-motive means users will have a reliable, trustworthy website they can go to for information.

• Compared to existing public sector solutions, AskHer aims to present information in a more user-friendly, digestible, and transparent format. We hope this can increase general public awareness of women’s health issues.

Explore AskHer's prototype here. All reviews and summaries on the platform have been generated for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect any experiences at actual clinics.

User feedback

We gathered feedback on the prototype with 5 women through structured interviews. In summary:

• Being able to filter clinics by conditions they have treated before and whether there is a female doctor available, were received well

• In particular, tags on individual clinics (e.g., on the type of concern treated, personality traits of the doctor) were useful for women to choose a clinic

• Many assumptions we had on the problem were validated - most participants shared that it's indeed difficult to get information on costs, subsidies, and treatment options on women's health

• Some concern on the viability of bringing clinics onto the platform to receive reviews

Moreover, we've had several feedback on Demo Day from women who found AskHer as a useful alternative to online communities such as Reddit.

Built by

Team members
Airika - Policy, user research
Amit Samdarshi - PM
Darren Ng - User research
Edgar Ang - Product & market research
Euan Lim - Engineer
Se Hyun - Design, user research
Sarah Espaldon - User research

Consultants
Kavya Joseph - External user research consultant
Kenneth Sng - Health product consultant
Praveen Raj Kumar - Health policy consultant