Is this your profile?
October 21, 2011
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.
October 21, 2011
Each DocSpot profile now sports a pithy but very important question: "Is this your profile"?
If you find yourself answering "yes" (assuming you're being honest with yourself and with us), you're in luck, because you can now claim your profile at our site and hide any incorrect or outdated information. This is a new feature for us and there might be a bug or two that hasn't quite yet flown away - so give it a try, and if anything is difficult, confusing, or just plain not working, please don't hesitate to shoot us an e-mail at support@docspot.com.
For now, claiming your profile allows you to hide or flag information that is out of date, incorrect, or private.
Within the next couple of months, you will be able to add new information as well - whether you recently moved and want to update your address, or we don't have residency information for you but you would like to add it, or you would like to add an additional website or picture. Claiming your DocSpot profile is free of charge, as is hiding or adding information, because we want the information at our site to be as accurate and complete as possible, and we want as many people as possible to join us in this cause.
We also have a couple of safeguards in place to help ensure that you can trust the data you see at our site. Health care providers must verify their identity via a confirmation code sent to a phone or fax number that we know to be associated with the provider. Additionally, for medically relevant pieces of information such as disciplinary action or medical school, providers may mark the information as incorrect but not hide it. The information will then remain on their profile for the public to see, along with a note indicating that the provider has flagged it as incorrect.
The opportunity for health care providers to claim their profiles at our site has been a long time coming, and we're excited to finally release it and watch our community continue to grow. Will you join us?
October 15, 2011
We'd like to grow the team. Do you know anyone who might be interested? We're looking for someone who's smart, enthusiastic, and detail-oriented. Additional details can be found here.
October 07, 2011
Here's an interesting article about a patient who got three different recommended treatments from three different doctors. Two of the three doctors recommended destroying the thyroid gland, condemning the patient to a lifelong regimen of iodine pills. The third doctor's successful recommendation treated the patient's condition without the lifelong consequences.
What accounts for the differences in the doctors' prescribed treatments? Perhaps more importantly, what pieces of data could be used to predict these differences? After all, I would clearly prefer the third doctor myself. But how could I find such a doctor without having the visit all three? Does anyone know? Even if we were to simplify the problem to be able to see which doctors are more likely to prescribe medication versus lifestyle changes (which would be very useful to prospective patients), what data could consumers look at to simplify their search? If you have any ideas, let us know.
October 02, 2011
Here's an interesting article about people leaving fake reviews, or rather, the entire industry dedicated to online review manipulation. Obviously, online reviews are not specific to health care, and neither are the issues that plague it.
To be clear, online reviews by other patients almost always comes up as an important issue. We don't deny that others' perspectives are important; it's just that in this age where glowing reviews can be bought for $5, it's probably a good idea to look at the volume of reviews (a couple reviews probably doesn't mean too much) and other pieces of information about a provider (e.g. where the provider trained). We try to address both by connecting users to information from multiple sources. Have other ideas on how to help patients select a provider? Let us know.
September 22, 2011
Earlier, I posted a note on the issues of privacy versus transparency. Obviously, others are wrestling through the same issues as well; for example, this New York Times article highlights the federal government's decision to make physician discipline and malpractice actions information less available. This is obviously a step in the wrong direction for those of us who want patients to make informed decisions.
A history of disciplinary and malpractice actions is medically relevant. To say that doctors' privacy trumps patient empowerment would be akin to saying that companies should have a right to redact their profiles from sites like Better Business Bureau. Even if people were to successfully argue that a corporation is meaningfully different as a service provider than an individual, the government should still at least make disciplinary and malpractice actions available at the company (or practice) level.
What puzzles me is that an administration that campaigned on the promise of transparency threatened a reporter with civil fines for trying to uncover a story. Instead of working to make information more readily available, the government is "reviewing the public use file and may change it to further assure confidentiality." Really? What happened to patients' interests?