Upcoming search form changes
July 21, 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.
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.
July 06, 2012
Just when we thought we made a clever improvement to the claim process, a provider wrote in to say that she couldn't receive the claim code. It turns out that her phone line was equipped with a phone menu, and our automated call system didn't know how to handle that.
To fix this, we have added an extra question to the claim form. If you tell us that you are not able to pick up the phone or the phone line has a phone menu, then we'll try to call you ourselves. Since this is an offline process, it'll take longer for you to get the code -- but you're more likely to get it. When you ask us to call you manually, please tell us what timezone you're in and when we should call. If you run into any problems like this, please let us know.
July 01, 2012
Most of our development efforts up until now have gone into improving back-end processes that most users will never directly see. We're now starting to turn more of our attention to the user interface. As part of this initiative, we'll be experimenting with a number of different page layouts over the next couple of months. If you use this site in a few weeks, there's a good chance that the page layout will be different from what you currently see. If you use this site again in another few weeks, you might see a different layout. If that happens, don't be alarmed -- we're testing out different layouts.
The plan is to update all three major page layouts (the search form, the search results page, and the profile page). Some of the changes have been planned for a while. Some other changes are ones that we're just now designing. As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback, it'd be great to hear from you.
June 21, 2012
We've noticed some confusion when providers claim and update their profiles. In particular, the confusion seems to arise when a provider first registers and then tries to update a profile. We regret the confusion and would just like to take a moment to clear things up.
Registering and claiming a profile are two entirely separate processes -- they should not be mixed. When someone registers, the system creates an account. When we display information for a provider, an account already exists -- it's just that no one has control of it until someone claims it. Thus, if a doctor wants to claim his account and first registers for one, he is creating another separate account that is unrelated to his profile. That newly registered account will not enable him to update his profile, and will probably use up his preferred username (maybe along with displaying a warning about a duplicate e-mail address being used).
So, if a provider would like to update a profile, the provider should skip the registration process. Instead, the provider should go directly to the appropriate profile and start the claim process. To help clarify this on the website, we have added a checkbox in the registration process, asking people to explicitly confirm that they are not a provider trying to claim or create a profile.
(Unfortunately, we don't have all of the details in place for someone to create an entirely new profile. While the technical implementation is not difficult, we would like there to be some verification that the provider actually exists and is properly licensed. For those who aren't listed on our site and would like to be, the easiest way is to first get listed in the National Provider Identifier database.)
I hope that clears up some of the confusion. If not, please let us know.