Dermatologist Bravis Hospital, founder of Webcamconsult and Derm2check
Dick van Gerwen has been a dermatologist since 1996 and is one of the early pioneers of digital healthcare in the Netherlands. At the beginning of this century, he already saw what the internet could mean for dermatology, and he built websites where patients could not only find information, but also directly consult a dermatologist. He is now at the foundation of Webcamconsult and Derm2check. In this part, he talks about his background and the first steps he took.
“A good dermatologist sees everything”
“I have been a dermatologist since 1996 and have been working at Bravis Hospital in Bergen op Zoom ever since. Before that, I trained in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Dermatology is a wonderful profession: you see an enormous variety of patients with all kinds of skin problems. And the great thing is that you can see it immediately: you don’t have to do all kinds of complicated tests. Sometimes I remove a piece of skin to make a diagnosis, but usually I make it quite quickly.”
That suits his character. “I am naturally quite impatient, so that works out well. And I am visually oriented. I always say: a good dermatologist sees everything.”
Huidconsult: information and a question to the dermatologist
Van Gerwen saw early on what the internet could mean. “At the beginning of this century, the internet emerged, and I thought: we need to do something with this. People are going to look up their skin problems on the internet anyway. In 2006, we started a website, Huidconsult, where you could find extensive information about hundreds of skin diseases.”
The innovation was in the interaction. “You could also immediately ask a question to a dermatologist: a few colleagues and I were involved in that. People filled in some additional information about their skin problem and then chose a mailback: a text response that they could only read when logged in. Everything properly secured. You could also choose a telephone consultation. That was very new at the time; I even presented it once at a conference in Sweden, and people were amazed at how simple the idea actually was.”
The telephone consultation that wasn’t allowed
However, the initiative ran up against the limits of the system. “I charged a small fee for it, about a quarter of a regular consultation. But there was no official administrative code for it in the Netherlands. And if something doesn’t exist, you can only do one thing: prohibit it. A pity, because after that I continued doing it for free for a while. In the end, my colleagues and I did about ten thousand of those consultations.”
The visibility attracted patients from far away. “Because we were easy to find on the internet, we got many patients from outside the region. People sometimes came all the way from Groningen or Heerlen to Bergen op Zoom. When you’re well-known, people quickly think it’s better there.”
The future is now with AI support
“When we started with Huidconsult years ago, digital skin care was still pioneering. A general practitioner would send a photo of a spot, and we would look at it remotely as dermatologists. That was already special for that time, a faster assessment, fewer unnecessary referrals, and patients who were reassured sooner.
What is now possible with Derm2check goes beyond what we dreamed of back then. You no longer have to wait for someone to forward your photo. You simply book a dermatologist yourself, online and directly. Everything we envisioned with Huidconsult is in there and it has become more advanced, more direct and more accessible than we thought possible at the time.”