Reaching a product milestone
September 23, 2012
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.
September 23, 2012
Last week, I mentioned that we updated our logo. Some of you might have also noticed a small textual change -- we believe our service has matured enough to call it beta. When we launched the site a couple of years ago, we knew that we had a lot more ground to cover. Nevertheless, we also knew that if we delayed the launch, we would miss out on valuable feedback. Our solution was to launch the site as alpha to indicate that the site was very much under development.
Since the launch, our site has improved in a number of ways:
- Providers can now claim their profiles and update relevant information about themselves
- Our search form and search results page are now (hopefully) more intuitive
- We have expanded geographic coverage
- We have added information from state licensing boards as well as information about reviews from around the web
- Our search results are generated much faster than before
Some of our other improvements have been less visual. For example, we now update information more frequently than before. We have also refined our data extraction software to be more precise.
We have many more ideas on how to improve our service during this beta phase. If you'd like us to prioritize any improvements that you have in mind, please let us know.
September 16, 2012
A while back, we decided to update our logo. It's taken a while and has also required many different iterations, but we're finally done. We hope the logo conveys an impression that is consistent with some more modern symbols of medicine.
If you have any feedback, please let us know.
September 07, 2012
While a majority of US health care providers will be able to find their profiles on DocSpot, there are some licensed providers that do not have a profile on our site. This is because we use the National Provider Identifier registry as our base source. So, if a provider is not listed in the NPI registry, that provider also won't be listed on our site by default. Up until recently, we didn't have a way for such providers to get added to our site.
This week, we rolled out changes to enable such providers to be listed on our site. We think this is a win for providers who would like to get found. We also think this is a win for patients who are looking for doctors that might fit their needs better. To find out more about the process, including the verification steps involved, please visit this page.
September 01, 2012
Hope you all have a relaxing and refreshing Labor Day weekend!
August 25, 2012
We have a lot of ideas of how to improve our service. We have so many that there's a substantial backlog of improvements just waiting to be designed and implemented. As a result, we find ourselves frequently prioritizing what to work on. Last week, we realized that we would need to invest a fair amount of work to make the search form look decent in Internet Explorer 7. After checking the percentage of visitors to this site that use IE7, we decided that that time could be better spent elsewhere. In case anyone is wondering, here are the browsers that we currently support:
Chrome (version 18 and later)
Firefox (version 13 and later)
Internet Explorer (version 8 and later)
Safari (version 5 and later)
If you're using one of these browsers and see anything that looks amiss, please let us know. Likewise, if you have any ideas on how to improve the service, let us know. Even if the idea is on our list already, we might prioritize it more highly just because you asked.