Transparency has its critics
January 17, 2014
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.
January 17, 2014
Dr. Leana Wen started a campaign among health care professionals, encouraging them to voluntarily pledge to always disclose any potential conflict of interests (e.g. payments from pharmaceutical companies). It is interesting to note that while the campaign is not lobbying for regulatory reform, Dr. Wen has received hostile responses from her colleagues. Someone who is too busy or is simply opposed to personally revealing potential conflicts of interests could simply choose not to participate -- so, why the animosity?
Dr. Wen addresses some of the arguments that have been put forth, including the paternalistic view that patients basically "can't handle the truth." We agree with her that it "should be up to the patients to decide what is relevant to them." Indeed, we look forward to when CMS will enable greater transparency regarding a physicians' financial relationships.
January 10, 2014
Over the past several months, we've kept track of some queries that our site hasn't understood. On occasion, we would find some rare conditions that we had overlooked, and we would train our software accordingly. But over and over, we kept finding common searches that our form should have been able to process but didn't: insurance companies, languages, patient age groups. We had incorrectly assumed that people would be content to enter the attributes they were looking for piece by piece.
Google has trained us as internet consumers to view search boxes as magical, all-purpose tools that will understand just about anything we throw at them. While we cannot purport to deliver the right set of results every single time, we can nevertheless try to make it easier for you to find the health care professionals you are looking for. To that end, we have upgraded our search box so that you can type in more complicated searches without having to go through all of the check boxes on the results page. Now you can type in "orthopedic surgery aetna" and you'll immediately see a list of orthopedists who accept Aetna. "Spanish BCBS" will give you information on health care providers who speak Spanish and accept Blue Cross Blue Shield.
We are constantly striving to make our site more helpful and easier to use for patients and professionals alike. Please don't hesitate to let us know.
January 01, 2014
We hope you all had a great holiday season and we hope that you have an even better year ahead of you.
Happy New Year!
December 26, 2013
It's been a terrific year for the team here at DocSpot. We're glad to have some time away from the office, and will be back at it next year.
Merry Christmas!
December 22, 2013
In case any of you were curious, we did finalize our health insurance selection for the company. The basic tradeoff is saving on monthly premiums (the cost of insurance, paid regardless of whether you use services) or saving on the costs of health care services when actually using them (known as coverage). Like anyone, we could choose lower-cost insurance, but be on the hook for more of the costs if something happens (think bronze level in the government's classification system), or we could pay more on a monthly basis and pay less if something happens (think platinum level).
As a team of relatively healthy individuals who rarely use health care services ourselves, we decided to go with lower monthly premiums. However, there was still the nagging question of what happens if a medical emergency should occur. To help mitigate against those unexpected costs, we calculated the difference between our monthly health premium and the premium of a higher-coverage plan that we were satisfied with. We plan on depositing that difference into a health savings account (HSA) on a monthly basis. Over time, we expect those savings to accumulate so that they would offset a significant part of the deductible used to pay for any major covered procedure. If no such event happens, then the savings should continue to accrue (and can be withdrawn at retirement). On a conceptual level, this helps capture some of the money that would be evaporating every month (used to pay for services that we don't actually use). The numbers work out such that if we consistently had to use health care services, it would make more financial sense to just get a more expensive plan with higher coverage (which would not be compatible with HSAs). For now, though, this combination is the one that seemed to make sense. We'll revisit the issue next year.