You can go to America Online’s Moviefone.com for when you want to see a film, and to Mapquest.com when you want directions.

But where do you go to find a doctor? And can the doctor see you today?

Former MapQuest and Moviefone executive Tommy McGloin thinks he has the answer: DoctorsDirect.com.

The Santa Monica-based Internet venture was launched by McGloin in July with half a million dollars, part of the money he took away from AOL. The service links patients with doctors that have signed on with the service, and allows appointments to be instantly scheduled.

McGloin, who is chief executive for DoctorsDirect.com, believes that positive elements of both Mapquest and Moviefone will translate in the health care arena.

“My stint at the helm of Moviefone gave me the inspiration on how to create a service that is immediately functional for doctors and patients,” said McGloin. “Moviefone started simple working with theaters to offer show times and tickets to moviegoers. In the same fashion, doctors will offer appointment times and medical services to prospective patients.”

The idea for such a service came to McGloin, 43, during the time after he’d left his executive stint at Time Warner and AOL. He decided he needed a physical and, without insurance or personal doctor, he had to start from scratch, eventually winding up at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

“I just thought there’s got to be a better way,” McGloin said. “You can do any kind of online banking, book any kind of travel, why can’t you pay for medical services online?”

DoctorsDirect.com has cobbled together a list of roughly 1,000 doctors and hopes to expand that number steadily with the ultimate goal of enrolling tens of thousands of doctors, practitioners and specialists. The doctors need to be board certified in their specialties.

McGloin said setting the charges for the medical treatment will remain the domain of the doctors, but DoctorsDirect will charge between $5 and $15 per call for references and appointments. He said that DoctorsDirect is usually utilized only for the initial reference, as doctors and the patients generally set their subsequent appointments on their own.

McGloin believes that the ability for consumers to quickly schedule an appointment, sometimes as quickly as the same day, will be the Web site’s strongest lure.

“I hate having to wait for six weeks,” McGloin said. “I hate having to wait for managed care telling me where I can or can’t go.”

McGloin said the doctors who have signed on with the service “see us as an opportunity to connect very directly to patients.”

Dr. Bernard Katz, who runs Santa Monica Bay Physicians Health Services, said he was eager to be onboard with DoctorsDirect.com.

“I think there are a lot of patients out there who are probably under-insured or are high deductibles who do not have established doctor-patient relationships,” said Katz, who added the system would work best for younger patients. “I think the perfect people for this are young, relatively healthy people. They’re Internet savvy.”

Rival services


One of the challenges for McGloin’s service will be distinguishing itself from the plethora of medical and self-help sites on the Internet.

There’s the highly advertised 1800Dentist.com, which matches patients to prescreened local dentists. DoctorsDirect.com’s service also somewhat parallels that of a fairly successful Web site called HealthGrades.com. More than 3 million users go on that site to find references and ratings for doctors and hospitals nationwide.

Scott Shapiro, vice president of corporate communications at HealthGrades, said amassing the information on doctors was the hard part.

“The information that people generally get out of their health plan directories tends to be out of date,” Shapiro said. “As much as 40 percent of that information was out of date last time we checked.”

McGloin said that while his site will cater primarily to affluent Internet users, it’s not exclusively limited to them. And he’s hoping that DoctorsDirect.com will become as familiar to consumers as Moviefone and MapQuest.

“It’s a little bit like the Internet,” he said. “It wasn’t just affluent people who adopted broadband, it was motivated people.”