A wary eye on those reviews
October 27, 2012
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 27, 2012
I've been analyzing reviews left on different sites and found something surprising. While I knew that some reviews are not actually left by patients who had seen the health care provider, I was surprised to see how widespread the problem can be. For example, if you perform an internet search for "I was worried that they were going to wear an obnoxious cologne", you might see many thousands of reviews on a site that include that specific phrasing. That suggests that someone developed software to automatically post reviews on a site. Unfortunately, without seeing a number of reviews across different providers, it can be hard to detect problems like this. (There are other phrases elsewhere that indicate similar issues.)
Assessing the value of patient reviews is tricky... on one hand, they can offer valuable feedback from actual patients; on the other hand, it's hard to know whether any specific review represents an authentic encounter. Hence, when selecting a provider, you might want to consider other aspects of a provider's care (in addition to the patient reviews that have been left about that provider).
October 19, 2012
Registered users can now express some preferences. These preferences are recorded at user registration and can be modified when visiting the "My account" link ("Edit", then "Preferences"). The first preference applies to everyone: users that want to hear about new features that are being released should check this box. The other three preferences are more oriented towards providers, asking if they are open to consulting, volunteering, or new career opportunities.
For now, these are placeholders to capture users' preferences early on; at the moment, none of these are being used (for example, we haven't been sending out e-mails announcing our new features). As the site matures, these preferences may come into play. Let us know if you have other ideas of preference options that you think we should offer.
October 14, 2012
Sometimes people change their names. For example, when a woman marries, she might take the last name of her husband. In the process, she might also change her middle name to be her former middle name. There's a slight issue in that if a provider has built up a practice with her former last name, she might want keep the power of that personal brand by letting people know her previous name.
Up until recently, we didn't have a way of allowing users to indicate their former names. One provider creatively indicated that by adding "formerly Penn" as a last name. Given how common this situation can be, we made changes this week so that providers can specify their former name. For now, the name will show up in parentheses, but we might change the display as time goes on.
October 07, 2012
Last week, we rolled out a small feature to help users pinpoint the geography of their searches. When users limit their searches to a certain geography (for example, a city), our site calls upon a geocoding service that translates the name of that geographic location into coordinates to perform the search. In some cases, a location can be reasonably translated into more than one set of coordinates. It used to be that when this happened, we would take the first set of coordinates.
Our small tweak continues to take the first set of coordinates; however, it will now also display other possibilities. For example, if you were to search for pediatricians in "Wake Forest, NC", you'll see a list of pediatricians in the vicinity of Wake Forest University, NC. You'll also see the option to see search results near the city of Wake Forest, NC.
September 28, 2012
The traffic to our site has been steadily growing. We can see the load on our server rising and we are grateful for the opportunity serve more users. At the same time, the amount of data that we handle has been increasing as well. While we are not quite at the limits of our current server, we would like to upgrade our infrastructure to avoid running up against those limits.
This is just to let you know that our service will be unavailable for some time on Saturday night, October 6, 2012. If all goes well, the outage should last less than an hour. After the upgrade is complete, we hope that service will be even more responsive.