Ask The Doctor To Start Accepting Bitcoin As Payment

Canadian startup Ask The Doctor announced Ask The Doctor To Start Accepting Bitcoin As Payment on Wednesday (Oct. 12) it is now accepting bitcoin as a new way to further help protect its patients’ privacy.

In a press release, the company said that users can choose to pay for advice from a physician by bitcoin on Ask The Doctor’s desktop platform. Users who want to keep their health care private can now hide their medical payments from their bank/credit card company.

“Many of our users ask extremely sensitive questions, from teenage pregnancy to STDs to drug use, that they are too afraid to go to their own doctor’s office to get help for. On top of that, many users don’t want their family members to know. While it does take some extra effort to have complete anonymity using bitcoin, it’s certainly a large improvement over a credit card,” said Prakash Chand, CEO of Ask The Doctor, in the press release.

Last month, Ask The Doctor started accepting an additional five currencies and has begun translating its large library of Q&A pairs to multiple languages — all with the goal of making doctor-created knowledge easier for patients globally to access. Later this month, Ask The Doctor will launch the bitcoin payment option on its mobile platform, it said.

While bitcoin makes paying an anonymous thing, Europe might like to make it less so. This past summer, the European Commission said it would like to create a central database of digital currency users to prevent terrorist financing and money laundering — for the obvious reasons. The regulators there would like to establish a central database by June 2019, whereby “obliged entities need to collect, process and record personal data and, sometimes, to share such data with public authorities (such as FIUs) or with private entities within the same group.”