A Canadian healthcare service firm is continuing to makwe itself stand out from the crowd, this time by converting more of its balance sheet from fiat to crypto.
“Ask The Doctor” is a Canadian healthcare services company headquartered in Toronoto. Its original purpose was just to provide health and medical information (in a similar way to WebMD). Currently, via its partner firms, it provides the following services:
- telemedicine consults
- covid-19 tests
- travel medical insurance
- dental procedures
- cosmetic procedures
- physio, chiro, and massage treatments
Prakash Chand is a Co-Founder of Ask The Doctor, as well as its Chairman and CEO. He also seems to be a huge advocate for crypto. In fact, in April 2016, HuffPost spoke to Chand, as well as Dr. Michael Warner, who was the Chief Medical Officer at the time, about the firm’s acceptance of crypto (Bitcoin and five other cryptocurrencies) as a means of payment.
When they were asked why the firm had started accepting Bitcoin, Warner replied:
“In the realm of healthcare, most consider the foundation of patient privacy as restricting access to the content of the doctor-patient interaction. In digital health, securing the content of such interactions is absolutely necessary but may not offer certain patients the level of privacy they require. Our customers share with us privileged and sensitive information. Until we added Bitcoin, our services had to be purchased using a Credit Card or Paypal. To some, having a banking paper trail documenting a transaction with “Ask The Doctor” did not provide them with a sufficient level of privacy.
“The other reason to offer payment through Bitcoin is to maximize accessibility to our services. Credit cards are not universally available. In some cultures, women do not have the same financial freedom as men to obtain them. Two-thirds of our customers are women and we have customers in every country in the developing world. Our overall goal is democratize access to health care, and offering Bitcoin is consistent with this goal.“
As for the the question of what was the firm’s vision, Chand said:
“Our goal is to replace users using Google and WebMD for medical advice. At the end of the day nobody can give a better answer to your medical question than a trained General Physician and/or Specialist.“
Then, last month, Ask The Doctor confirmed that it was going to add support for the three most popular dog meme cryptocurrencies: Dogecoin ($DOGE), SHiba Inu ($SHIB), Floki Inu ($FLOKI)
Later that day, Ask The Doctor tweeted that it had added around $1.5 million in $SHIBN to its balance sheet with the help of Kraken.
A few hours later, Ask The Doctor said that it was going to add another $1.5 million in crypto (DOGE or $SHIB) to its balance sheet.
Two days later, the ehathcare services firm said that it had started accepting $SHIB as a form of payment with the help of crypto payment processor NOWPayments.
It also confirmed that after these two large purchases of $SHIB, it was holding around 65 billion $SHIB on its balance sheet.
Well, yesterday, Ask The Doctor announced that it had just converted more dollars in its balance sheet to $SHIB and $ETH.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
