New fields to accommodate name changes
October 14, 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 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.
September 23, 2012
Last week, I mentioned that we updated our logo. Some of you might have also noticed a small textual change -- we believe our service has matured enough to call it beta. When we launched the site a couple of years ago, we knew that we had a lot more ground to cover. Nevertheless, we also knew that if we delayed the launch, we would miss out on valuable feedback. Our solution was to launch the site as alpha to indicate that the site was very much under development.
Since the launch, our site has improved in a number of ways:
- Providers can now claim their profiles and update relevant information about themselves
- Our search form and search results page are now (hopefully) more intuitive
- We have expanded geographic coverage
- We have added information from state licensing boards as well as information about reviews from around the web
- Our search results are generated much faster than before
Some of our other improvements have been less visual. For example, we now update information more frequently than before. We have also refined our data extraction software to be more precise.
We have many more ideas on how to improve our service during this beta phase. If you'd like us to prioritize any improvements that you have in mind, please let us know.
September 16, 2012
A while back, we decided to update our logo. It's taken a while and has also required many different iterations, but we're finally done. We hope the logo conveys an impression that is consistent with some more modern symbols of medicine.
If you have any feedback, please let us know.