Sorting search results
May 02, 2014
At DocSpot, our mission is to connect people with the right health care by helping them navigate publicly available information. We believe the first step of that mission is to help connect people with an appropriate medical provider, and we look forward to helping people navigate other aspects of their care as the opportunities arise. We are just at the start of that mission, so we hope you will come back often to see how things are developing.
An underlying philosophy of our work is that right care means different things to different people. We also recognize that doctors are multidimensional people. So, instead of trying to determine which doctors are "better" than others, we offer a variety of filter options that individuals can apply to more quickly discover providers that fit their needs.
May 02, 2014
We rolled out another long-awaited feature this week: the ability to sort provider profiles (by patient rating or by distance). Sometimes, you don't want filter providers out completely, but you do want to see how they compare with one another along a certain dimension. For example, if you just wanted to see which doctors are closest to your home or office, the sort-by-distance feature allows you to do so.
When sorting by patient ratings, the order might be slightly different from what you might expect. Instead of sorting strictly by average patient ratings, we also consider how many reviews contributed to that average score. For example, a provider that received 10 reviews that average of 4.8 stars would be regarded as rated higher than a provider that received a single 5-star review. As the number of reviews increase, the more confident we are that the average score is representative of the patients' opinions.
Over time, we plan on adding other dimensions to sort by. If you have any ideas for what we should add, please let us know.
April 26, 2014
We've been working on some user interface changes, and just rolled out a change that we've had in mind for quite some time. There's a new mini-search form in the header, which allows users to start a new search from any page that it's on. Sometimes, users might want to refine their current search (for example, to more precisely specify the location of their house or office), and this mini-search form makes it easier to do so.
This is just one change of many that we are planning on rolling out. If you have any suggestions on changes that you would like to see, please let us know.
April 19, 2014
The BBC ran an excellent article outlining some of the complexities involved with pharmaceutical companies giving gifts to doctors. The train of thought can start out innocently enough ("Doctors could go to a restaurant, learn something, get a nice dinner - what was wrong with that? Is education better in a monastery than in a restaurant?"), but the article cites a study that "found that a doctor receiving payments from a pharmaceutical firm was more than twice as likely to prescribe its drugs, compared to doctors receiving no payments." My guess is that more research into this subject would be positive, and that in the meantime, disclosure of these gifts would be helpful in allowing the patient decide whether there might be a conflict of interest. Fortunately, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act mandates that manufacturers disclose "transfers of value" to physicians.
The industry group's response to the mandate disclosures? "PhRMA is concerned that the Sunshine Act may have a 'chilling effect' on the exchange of information, saying some doctors are refusing medical article reprints from drug reps because these can be seen as 'transfers of value'." Somehow, I think there's a lot more at stake than article reprints.
April 12, 2014
We just crossed a major milestone. Recently, we've been working on a major update to our search functionality, and we just released the initial version yesterday. One of the major goals was to reduce page load times, and I think we've achieved that in a meaningful way. We've also improved search results. For example, if we fail to find providers in a specific geographic area who have specialized in a very specific specialty (e.g. "pediatric cardiac anesthesiology"), we will try and find providers in a broader but still related specialty (e.g. "pediatric anesthesiology"). There are also some more subtle fixes, such as improving the accuracy of the counts next to the filter options.
Like any major change or initial releases, we expect that there will be issues that we haven't identified yet. If you encounter anything that seems odd, please let us know. We look forward to continuing to improve our search functionality over time.
April 05, 2014
Last year, CMS explored the idea of releasing data from the Medicare claims database (noted earlier). This week, they announced the next step. The information is to include data on "6,000 different types of services and procedures provided, as well as payments received by individual health care providers."
This is a very exciting step for people pushing for transparency in the health care industry. After a few decades of a legal injunction barring the release of the data, CMS is now starting the process. Noted further down in the announcement is CMS's budgeting to further health care pricing transparency. We look forward to integrating additional data to help consumers select an appropriate health care provider.