An example of doctors unhappy about reviews
May 18, 2013
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.
May 18, 2013
Earlier, we posted an infographic analysis about online patient reviews. We found that the majority of reviews gave health care professionals top scores. We had read other recent data that suggested that online patient reviews tend to be positive. However, the change in conventional wisdom is still relatively nascent.
There was an article in Boston Globe citing the president of a medical society who believes that online reviews present a skewed picture of doctors. We responded with a blog post. We think that online patient reviews are another data point to help patients make decisions about selecting doctors for treatment. While these reviews come with their own set of problems, we think that on balance, they can be helpful. As such, we would like to see the medical community stop discouraging patients from consulting these reviews and realize that they can be an asset for both the patient and the doctor.
May 10, 2013
When providers want to claim their profiles, we ask them to verify their identity by selecting a pre-registered phone number for us to call. We call them using an automated system, delivering a code that they can then enter to complete the claim process. About a week ago, the platform that we used to deliver these automated calls stopped working. Thinking that it would be fixed in just a day or two, we changed the text for the process to indicate that the automated calls were temporarily unavailable.
The day or two turned into a week, and not knowing when the issue would finally be resolved, we switched vendors. The integration with the new vendor went live early Friday morning. If you've tried to claim a profile recently and have run into any problems, please let us know.
May 05, 2013
This site was down for a couple of hours on Friday, May 3rd because I accidentally deleted some key files. Fortunately, we were able to restore the files from our staging server, but we regret any inconvenience this might have caused.
If you visited our site during that time and saw just a white screen or something else, now you know why. We're getting better at this, but still learning.
April 27, 2013
In addition to some of the changes highlighted last week, we've continued to tweak the user profile. Now, underneath the provider's name, we have included some additional summary information. For example, our user testing indicated that at least some people would like to see where a doctor graduated from medical school near the top, so we've included that information. Likewise, users no longer need to click on the Reviews tab to see if we've found reviews from around the web. If we have review information, we'll report the aggregate statistics (number of reviews and average rating) underneath the provider's name. One exception is that since Yelp forbids the storing of information from their service, users generally won't know if there are reviews from there unless they click on the Reviews tab. We have also included a summary of disciplinary action information in the same area at the top of the profile.
Hopefully, these summaries make it easier to read a provider's profile. For those who want more details, some links are generally included to help them find out more.
April 19, 2013
Based on some recent user testing, we're starting to reorganize content on the user profile pages. Users have indicated that the organization of the tabs can be confusing and that users don't necessarily know what to expect before they click on a tab. In addition to addressing this feedback by reorganizing the tabs, we are trying to eliminate some tabs by combining their content with other tabs as well as trying to better align the tab content with the filters found on the search results page.
We're not done yet, so expect some changes in the coming weeks. For example, we've come to understand that some content should be highlighted differently, so we'll be working on some those changes. As always, if you have any feedback or would like to participate in user testing, please let us know.