Mapping Medicare Referrals
February 01, 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.
February 01, 2013
When viewing doctor profiles, some of you might have noticed a new tab called "Medicare Referrals". We've incorporated data from Medicare showing which doctors have referred Medicare patients to other doctors. The tab is divided into outbound referrals (whom the doctor has referred to) and inbound referrals (whom the doctor has accepted referrals from). This data gives viewers a sense of the other providers a doctor might consult.
The data only covers Medicare referrals in 2011, and only shows referrals between individual providers (not between, say, one doctor and a lab). We also show the volume of referrals associated with a relationship.
We have some ideas of how to make the data more useful. For example, it might be interesting to know which doctors are the ones that are most widely referred to. If you have other ideas of how to make this data useful, please let us know.
January 26, 2013
We recently discovered that certain e-mail servers were automatically rejecting some e-mails that we sent. We typically don't send automated e-mail unless there's some triggering event that is related to an account (e.g. signing up for a new account or recovering a password). However, since account registration requires confirmation of a valid e-mail address, this means that when some people signed up for an account, they expected to receive an e-mail to complete the process. Unfortunately, our server got a rejection from their e-mail server and we didn't have a great way of notifying the users. So, some people waited a long time. Call this a casualty of spam-fighting techniques.
After discovering this, we changed e-mail servers and hope that the issue has been resolved. We also sent out a follow-up e-mail using our new mail server to inform the people who were affected. If you ever detect something amiss like this, please let us know via our contact form -- your help in identifying the issue earlier would certainly be appreciated.
January 17, 2013
Last week, I moved our server from one colocation facility to another. Since the server would be offline, I decided that it would be a good time to upgrade our server operating system to a more current version. The upgrade turned out to be more challenging than anticipated, and the website was not available on the following day. Since then, I also took the server offline at night for some other issues. Finally, I think we were done for this round.
With the hardware, software, and network all upgraded, we anticipate not having to take the server offline any time soon. Now, onto other areas for improvement!
January 09, 2013
I hope everyone had a good chance to rest and connect with family and friends during the holiday season. We were recently informed by our colocation provider that our network traffic has outgrown their facilities. Consequently, we'll be moving our server tonight to a different facility.
While our server is in transit and in the process of getting set up, this site will be unavailable. The process will likely last for a few hours, and we hope to have everything operational again before 5 AM PST tomorrow morning.
January 01, 2013
Happy New Year, everyone! It remains quiet around the office, but we look forward to bettering this site this year.
We've spent some time outlining our broad goals for this year, but haven't finished that discussion yet. If you have input on what features to prioritize, it'd be great to hear from you.