Up Close & Personal with Grace Park - Co-Founder & President, DocDoc
“Do and build something that really matters to you and to others. Your purpose will sustain through the highs and lows along the way.”
Grace Park, Co-Founder & President of DocDoc
About DocDoc
Founded in 2012, DocDoc is an AI-powered doctor discovery platform that helps patients identify high-quality specialized medical care for their unique needs, and follows them through the continuum of care combining telemedicine and a cashless payment solution for handling huge medical bills.
Headquartered in Singapore, with additional offices in the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong, today DocDoc has Asia’s largest doctor network, with more than 23,000 doctors under contract and 793 clinics and hospitals throughout the region. With a growing network of doctors located in the healthcare centres of excellence, no other company has interviewed and vetted nearly as many doctors as DocDoc.
We speak to Grace Park, co-founder and President of DocDoc, who has just been awarded the prestigious Women Icon 2019 award, a change maker who is redefining the future of healthcare.
I have read a lot about your experience about building teams and your entrepreneurship journey. What’s the one defining moment for you in your journey? How has that changed your perspectives?
The defining moment was when the purpose of DocDoc became clear. It was right after our infant daughter’s liver transplant with my husband and Co-founder & CEO of DocDoc, Cole Sirucek. Despite having extensive connections in the healthcare industry from nearly 10 years of experience as an executive in corporate healthcare, and having the means to pay for the procedure, we faced numerous challenges in finding the right doctor and care team for our daughter.
We realised that the real pain point in healthcare was the very same problem we had faced - the lack of access to relevant information while finding the right doctor for ourselves or our loved ones.
Information regarding medical prices, and doctor’s background and expertise in treating a particular condition or procedure are often unavailable for patients to make informed healthcare decisions. The status quo today is that patients choose grey-haired doctors and/or those with excellent bed-side manners, assuming these indicators correlate with higher expertise and better predicted outcomes. Unfortunately, it does not. The information asymmetry in healthcare between patients and medical practitioners often translates to undue stress on patients, increased healthcare costs, as well as increased treatment complication and readmission rates. It is unacceptable that distressed patients should also have to navigate an opaque medical maze. We needed to solve the patients’ real pain points and that is what we are doing at DocDoc.
How do you keep yourself abreast of innovation to ensure that DocDoc is constantly innovating?
We start with the patient first. We don’t innovate for the sake of innovating because we believe that focusing on innovation is the wrong approach. Focus on the end-user instead and identify the real pain points. Following this step, explore and identify which technologies can solve these pain points effectively. That’s real innovation - innovation from the customers’ needs backwards. The patient testimonials we receive on a daily basis confirm that we are solving real pain points. Our average Net Promotor Score is 88 on a scale of 100, which affirms we are consistently delighting our customers. This is extraordinarily high, but only because patients’ needs are not being met by the existing system.
What’s keeping you awake at night these days?
My daughter! She literally wakes me up in the middle of the night.
If the question is what I am worried or fearful about, then I would say that negative emotions are not useful to entrepreneurs as we need to juggle multiple balls in the air at any point in time. Worry and fear only wears us out mentally and that may lead to other health issues. Why carry the extra burden when our load is already full?
My advice is to prioritise important tasks compared to urgent tasks and clearly chalk out what must be achieved for each day. It is easy to fall prey to scope creep as entrepreneurs want to do everything at once. In addition, ensure that your tasks to reach critical milestones are measured and progress is closely tracked. This will allow you to learn quickly and modify your approach or even your product if needed. Lastly, surround yourself with the right people in the key roles. For us, it was important that critical positions were filled by distinguished first-hand experts and not someone who had only observed someone else performing the same tasks before.
How do you de-stress/recharge?
I rest and recharge through a few ways. In terms of physical health, I try to sleep enough hours, hydrate with plenty of water, and eat healthy foods. Consistent exercise to build muscle strength is important so I have been pumping the weights at the gym to ensure my metabolic rate is solid. It is quite easy to backslide and neglect our physical health, but taking good care of our physical wellbeing is tied to our mental wellbeing and brain function. On Sundays, my family and I attend church to recharge – it’s my “chicken soup for the soul.” Otherwise, seeing the world in my child’s eyes and engaging in creative outlets with her have been enjoyable and memorable along the way.
Otherwise, one of the more significant mindset shifts I have made over the years as an entrepreneur is to appreciate the journey. It is not easy to cultivate this mindset, but attempting to pursue it with conscious effort has made a huge difference in my overall state of being.
Who is your role model and why?
Several role models have inspired me throughout my journey. They are typically people of any age who identify a greater societal problem and who do something meaningful to solve it, no matter how difficult it seems at first.
My first role model, who I wrote about in one of my essays in the application to the United States Military Academy at West Point, is my great grandmother.
The Korean culture is patriarchal, yet in my family, my great grandmother was our family leader as she was the eldest. She was small in size, but a giant in stature. She exemplified someone who had grit, persevering through hardship when she and 11 children in her household needed to escape the North Korean soldiers during the Korean War. My great grandmother stuck to and passed on her values of hard work, integrity and courage despite facing seemingly insurmountable challenges. These are great life lessons applicable to any environment.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years’ time? Professionally & Personally?
My vision is that DocDoc would meaningfully change the status quo so that the everyday patient makes data-driven decisions in his or her doctor discovery process. No longer will patients rely on anecdotes.
Personally, I would like to be a good role model for my daughter and demonstrate by example that if she believes in herself, then anything is truly possible.
What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs? 3 Takeaways?
Purpose: Do and build something that really matters to you and to others. Your purpose will sustain through the highs and lows along the way.
People: Every entrepreneur’s journey is filled with critics along the way. Surround yourself with people you trust, share your values, and can move your company forward.
Mindset: Never give up. It will take 110% to make things happen. It is how the entrepreneur reacts to adversity that matters at the end.