Blog

The traffic to our site has been steadily growing. We can see the load on our server rising and we are grateful for the opportunity serve more users. At the same time, the amount of data that we handle has been increasing as well. While we are not quite at the limits of our current server, we would like to upgrade our infrastructure to avoid running up against those limits.

The traffic to our site has been steadily growing. We can see the load on our server rising and we are grateful for the opportunity serve more users. At the same time, the amount of data that we handle has been increasing as well. While we are not quite at the limits of our current server, we would like to upgrade our infrastructure to avoid running up against those limits.

This is just to let you know that our service will be unavailable for some time on Saturday night, October 6, 2012. If all goes well, the outage should last less than an hour. After the upgrade is complete, we hope that service will be even more responsive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hope you all have a relaxing and refreshing Labor Day weekend!

Hope you all have a relaxing and refreshing Labor Day weekend!