An updated homepage
August 11, 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.
August 11, 2012
On Friday, we updated our homepage with the goal of making it easier for people to find appropriate providers. For instance, to have only a single call to action, we made it so that only a single search bar is visible at a time. By default, people can search by a specialty, condition, or procedure, they don't have to know that terms like "cosmetic surgery" isn't an actual medical specialty. To search by the name of a provider or to search for a hospital, users can select the appropriate tab on the left of the search form.
All in all, we hope that the process is clearer to users new and old, and that the process is quicker than before. We still have some changes that we might be rolling out over time. Nevertheless, if you have ideas on how to improve the website, please let us know.
August 03, 2012
After reviewing our sitemaps (the pages that showcase the cities for which we feature providers), we noticed that there were quite a few typos -- "New Yor" vs. "New York" for example. Since our sitemaps are automatically generated by our software, they will include all cities in providers' addresses, regardless of whether or not they are misspelled. What we had not realized was how frequent the typos were, not to mention their sheer variety.
The most common misspelled cities tend to be long, but not necessarily obscure:
Instead of Brooklyn, NY, we discovered "Brookly," "Brookyln," and "Brookyn."
In lieu of San Francisco, CA, we found "San Franciso" vs. "San Francsico," and "San Fransisco".
In place of Philadelphia, PA, (an admittedly difficult-to-spell name), a slew of silly alternatives:
"Phialdelphia," "Philadelhia," "Philadelpia," "Philadephia," "Philadlephia," "Philaelphia," "Phildelphia," "Philiadelphia."
Perhaps most unexpected were typos in state names. We were surprised to discover that several sources had listed providers' offices as being in "Tucson, AS" -- AS as in American Samoa. Or addresses that placed doctors in fantastical locations such New York, North Carolina or Brooklyn, New Mexico.
In the upcoming weeks, we hope to pare down the number of typos in city names to further improve your experience using DocSpot.
July 27, 2012
We're always looking for new and relevant sources of information to integrate into our database so that people can more easily find doctors that match what they're looking for. Recently, someone mentioned that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published a list of providers who were eligible to receive the EHR Incentive Program. We thought that would be a great resource in helping patients figure out which providers use an electronic medical record, so we integrated data from CMS's website.
You can see a sample profile that incorporates that data
here. We'll be refreshing that list periodically to reflect the growing numbers of providers who are participating in that program.
July 21, 2012
If you go to our home page, you'll see that the main feature is a multi-part search form that you can use to browse for health care providers by location and specialty, look up a particular provider whose name you know, or browse for providers who commonly treat a specific condition (like glaucoma) or perform a particular procedure (like LASIK). Based on feedback we've received from our users, we're working on making this form more intuitive and easier to use, and you should see these changes soon.
Most importantly, we want to make sure people can easily choose the most efficient and hassle-free path toward finding a doctor who's a great fit for their needs. With our old (as in, current, for now) layout, this wasn't happening. For example, in a user feedback session I would show a user the search form and ask him to tell me how he would use this form to look for a doctor for a family member who has diabetes. More often than not, the user would begin speculating about what kind of specialist might treat a diabetic patient. Browse by location and specialty form on the left side of the page. Browse by condition or procedure form; however, since this form is located closer to the lower right side of the page, people's attention isn't drawn toward it.
We're trying to fix this. What you'll see as changes are rolled out is that the three different kinds of searches we offer will be combined into one central location on the screen. Our hope is that, for example, someone who's looking for a doctor to treat ADD or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will no longer have to guess what kind of specialist she should look for, but rather can easily see that she can use our site to search directly for a doctor who has experience treating her particular condition.
We're also releasing a few other changes to try to make the page look cleaner and less busy, and we're planning on adding some snippets of recent reviews at the bottom of the page to highlight the fact that many people are leaving reviews of the providers on our site. We hope you enjoy these changes, and, as always, let us know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.
July 12, 2012
A while back, we introduced a feature to allow users to mark a phone number as incorrect. When we did this, we required the user to prove that he or she had access to the corresponding phone line. What we didn't anticipate were users who tried out a phone number, found it to be invalid, and subsequently came back to tell us about it.
We started noticing this problem when a lot of automated phone calls failed. We manually called these numbers and verified that they were indeed invalid numbers. Realizing this, we decided to allow users indicate a phone number is wrong, even if they don't have access to the corresponding phone line.
This approach does allow mischievous pranksters to wrongly flag a phone number as incorrect. When a provider tries to claim a profile, he or she will still be able to proceed with a number that has been flagged. Once that profile has been claimed, then other users will not be able to flag numbers to prevent such abuse from happening.
With this compromise, we'll hopefully end up with more accurate data.