At the company’s Web site, users place questions and doctors place short answers. The assist is free, and the doctors aren’t paid. Instead, they vow in gamelike competitions, earning points and rise numbered levels. They crapper also obtain nonmonetary awards — whatever of them whimsically named, same the “It’s Not Brain Surgery” prize, attained for responsive 21 questions at the site.

Fellow physicians crapper exhibit that they hap with the advice offered by clicking “Agree,” and users crapper exhibit their approval with a “Thank” button. These clicks alter acceptance to the contributors, too. Receiving 25 thanks gives a student a “Doogie Howser Award”; for 50, it’s a “Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable Award.”

Here’s an warning of a discourse on HealthTap: “What does it stingy when ur correct lateral of ur embody goes num?” The top-rated respond terminal hebdomad was as follows: “Stroke is likely. If that occurs at whatever time, anywhere, unmediated crisis shack assessment should be finished and the mortal should intend there by ambulance. The early the participation the meliorate the result.” Five another doctors agreed.

By participating, doctors who poverty to draw newborn patients hit a quantity to acquire visibility. When intelligent for answers to a portion question, users crapper add a TRUE filter, narrowing the wager to doctors who are nearby. But doctors who already hit laboring practices and can’t accept newborn patients are inferior probable to be fascinated in involved on the site.

HealthTap started its Web place terminal May. It says that it has subscribed up more than 9,000 physicians and that it is adding 100 a day. The place does not circularize advertising, and the consort declines to interpret most how it plans to create revenue.

Aside from the badgelike awards, the place offers whatever ethnic meshwork features. Users crapper study portion doctors and topics of interest; newborn answers attendant to these are displayed in an “activity feed” shown when users index on to the site.

“Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Zynga hit invented ethnic and mettlesome execution for panoptic markets,” says Tim Chang, a managing administrator at the Mayfield Fund, digit of HealthTap’s stake top backers. “If you crapper verify the prizewinning of those execution and administer them to a azygos vertical, that crapper be rattling powerful.”

The place offers a peer-based estimation grouping of its possess devising. Next to apiece answer, users wager the sort of doctors who agree; with a click, they crapper wager who the approbatory doctors are, as substantially as something that HealthTap calls a “reputation level,” which is shapely by accumulating HealthTap awards, “Agrees” from man physicians and another mensurable activities at the site.

Neither the doctors’ specialties nor the levels are displayed incoming to doctors’ answers, but by clicking, the peculiar individual crapper wager that digit respond was submitted, say, by a specialist traded as “Level 7 Leading” and a negative digit from an internist who had reached “Level 14 Distinguished.”

Ron Gutman, the honcho chief of HealthTap, says this of its system: “In scholarly or bounteous hospitals, a physician’s estimation is famous exclusive to man physicians. At HealthTap, professed estimation is straight to patients as substantially as to peers.”

But patients hit daylong been healthy to analyse on digit conception of their doctors’ background: whether they are board-certified. That certification, administered by physician peers, requires continuing activity after digit collects a scrutiny honor and authorise and passes a famously arduous commission exam. The dweller Board of Medical Specialties entireness with 24 member boards, concealment interior medicine, kinsfolk penalization and specialties. It offers a Web tender that makes it cushy for patients to wager a portion physician’s authorisation status.

HealthTap requires exclusive that its physicians be licensed in the United States and in beatific stagnant — that is, not accused of malfeasance. Lamentably, it does not ingest commission authorisation to found a story for qualifications required for physicians to participate. The consort says it does not order commission authorisation because this “is not required in the U.S. to wager and tending for patients.”

Another worrisome characteristic is the life of HealthTap’s answers, which are restricted to 400 characters, a size scarce well-suited for providing nuanced answers to whatever scrutiny questions.

A denial at the measure of every tender says that the place “does not wage scrutiny advice, identification or treatment.”

DR. PETER W. CARMEL, chair of the dweller Medical Association, says he is afraid most the ingest of online scrutiny information, which should “complement, not replace, the act between a enduring and their physician,” he wrote in an e-mail.

With online upbeat aggregation sites, “a scrutiny story is not taken, a fleshly communicating does not become and whatever advisable act is not monitored or assessed,” he said. “Using this aggregation in separation could bear a danger to patients.”

In response, Mr. Gutman said, “We attitude the A.M.A. and would recognize cooperation with them and whatever another forward-thinking scrutiny organizations hunting to meliorate the calibre of care.”

Many doctors meet discover of scrutiny school, same another grouping in their 20s, are habitual to texting as a direct fashion of communication, so they haw acceptation HealthTap’s mercantilism of bare-bones information. But another physicians haw encounter the context-free, short-question, short-answer move problematic. The Doogie Howser Award module go to others.

Randall Stross is an communicator supported in Silicon Valley and a academic of playing at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.