Claiming vs. registering
June 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.
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.
June 16, 2012
This week, we worked on yet another small improvement that most users won't notice: we improved the profile claim process. As background, we've been getting reports of providers trying to claim their profiles while not being near the phone number that they're using to perform the claim. It's not hard to imagine a busy provider wanting to do this from home, but only having his or her office numbers listed on the profile. In this scenario, one can imagine the provider going ahead to start the process rather than risk forgetting to claim the profile at a later time. The underlying assumption would be that our system would leave a message on the office answering service.
Unfortunately, our previous call script would not wait for the answering service message to finish, and as a result, the claim code would often not get recorded. In response to some inquiries, we have modified the call script to try to detect the situation when an answering service might pick up and wait for a pause before continuing with the script.
If you have other ideas of what needs to be fixed, please let us know.
June 08, 2012
We're updating our user interface today. These aren't major, thematic changes - such as when the Twix logo went from serif to sans serif letters (okay, maybe that wasn't major, but it was shock to me as a kid). Instead, I've been working on cleaning up the style that already exists. This basically means two things.
First, frames should now be properly aligned and properly sized. For example, the navigation bar at the top of the search results page will stretch as far as the map stretches. Thus, there'll be a single edge defining the right side of the page. And if you resize the page, this edge will be maintained.
Second, the style should be more consistent. For instance, I tried to unify the search results page by making all the headers and borders the same color. This might run the risk of being too monochromatic, but I think the red accent helps prevent that. I also made sure that this header/border color was the same from the search results page to the user profile pages.
I hope you enjoy these small touches. If you have other feedback on how to present a better user experience, please let us know.
June 03, 2012
As we iterate on our business model, we're looking for help to sell online advertising space. Know people who might be interested? If so, tell them to
We think it'd be a great opportunity for the successful candidate to grow with the business.
May 27, 2012
When we launched DocSpot publicly, we reserved some space for advertising. Since advertising revenue was always supposed part of the long-term business plan, we didn't want consumers to be surprised when we started to rely on it. However, since the traffic started out small and we had a lot of other things to work on, we didn't spend much time figuring out how to maximize revenue -- we just participated in the advertising network that is probably the easiest one to use. Over the last year, our traffic has grown substantially enough that we're starting to give this formerly neglected area of business some more attention.
If you know of good advertising networks or are familiar with the direct sales model for advertising, we'd like to hear from you. We're still early in our process of figuring out what path to take, but we'd like to explore some options.