Just what does quality mean?

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.