The health care information tide rises slowly
August 04, 2013
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.
August 04, 2013
DocSpot has been under development for over four years, and a central challenge has been getting access to meaningful data to help people make better health care decisions. Pricing information in particular has been rare. Over the years, we've witnessed some changes. One recent example is Medicare's posting of pricing information. Another example mentioned in the news last month is how some providers in Oklahoma have been posting surgery prices.
This shift in mentality makes sense -- as Americans continue to fret over rising health care premiums, patients are increasingly asked to bear more of the costs of medical care. As more and more people pay out of their own pockets, demand for lower-cost services increases. Some providers respond by advertising their lower prices. Obviously, we'll continue to have high-cost providers for a long time (people continue to associate high prices with high quality and changes in the health care industry happen much more slowly than in some other industries), but we're encouraged by the initial signs of an industry changing to become more transparent.
July 27, 2013
The Boston Globe recently ran an article about hospital ratings. The article presents several interesting points, including the statistic that 9 out of 10 hospitals are rated as "average" in terms of mortality rates. What's particularly interesting is how people from the provider community feel that a rating system may make inappropriate distinctions and that "a worthwhile hospital ranking system would need to be based on more sophisticated underlying data than what's now available." A similar phenomenon happens with the idea of rating doctors:
1) Consumers want to figure out which doctors to select for their personal care
2) Organizations create some ranking system based on insufficient data
3) Providers complain that the ranking system is clearly flawed, citing a lack of meaningful data
4) People call for the release of the data that would be meaningful
5) Providers respond with silence
In step 5, you might get what seems to be a more reassuring response like "any accredited doctor/hospital is qualified to treat patients," but that dismisses the fact that there is tremendous variation even among accredited providers. Just because a group of investors might all have the same appropriate credentials doesn't mean that there is uniformity with their returns. You can probably say the same for any profession that requires thought and skill, so why not medicine? Just because a provider is qualified to treat a patient doesn't mean that provider will be the best choice for that patient. And when the patient has something significant on the line (such as quality of life), it's understandable that the patient wants to select the best choice, not just any qualified provider.
So, rather than see people from the provider community hide behind the "lack of meaningful data" excuse, how about they actually change the cycle by releasing the data that they want to be rated on? By only complaining about the ranking system and not trying to shape it, providers give up an important opportunity to shape a dialogue that is already happening.
July 19, 2013
When I started working on DocSpot in 2009, I sent an e-mail to CMS asking for a database dump of their Physician Compare product. They politely declined. The person responding to my e-mail noted that their service was always available. Sigh, another data silo. Among other attributes, Medicare's data set gives some indication as to whether a provider accepts Medicare insurance, which can be an important factor in selecting a doctor.
Years later, they noted on their website that the data for Physician Compare was available on their website, grouping it with other data sets such as Hospital Compare (which actually were available). I would periodically check, but alas, the data for Physician Compare continued to not be available despite indications otherwise. I was excited to find out today that they actually do have the data available now. For those curious, the data set contains over 800,000 providers, but that number includes non-physicians (e.g. nurses). We'll be working on integrating that data set.
July 12, 2013
Quality means different things to different people. For example, a young professional might factor in amenities such as online secure messaging or same-day appointments. Someone with a rare condition might look for a provider who has experience treating that condition. A recent blog piece articulated this notion nicely in regards to hospital quality.
To add to the diversity of opinions, some quality measures (such as success rates for specific surgeries) are not publicly available, so people will look at different proxies for quality (such as years of experience or where a doctor trained). Rather than imposing our view of what quality means or how it should be measured, we enable users to filter according to criteria that are important them individually. As more data becomes publicly available, we hope to incorporate the data so that users can use more specific criteria. If you know of any data sets that would be interesting for us to integrate, please let us know.
July 05, 2013
Earlier this week, we released some more changes to make our site more mobile-friendly. First, the profile page is now responsive. As with the changes to the other pages, the goal is to allow the user to see all relevant information without having to scroll horizontally. Second, the search form now asks for the browser's location.
We have other user interface changes in mind, and may actually revert back temporarily to older versions to test different aspects. If you run into any problems, please let us know -- it would be very helpful to know about problems that we might not have encountered ourselves.