BCBSNC rolls out cost transparency tool
January 26, 2015
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.
January 26, 2015
As another example of the trend of increasing transparency when selecting medical care, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina announced the rollout of their online tool to help consumers select among providers. Users can now search for a procedure in a specific area in North Carolina and get back a list of providers and prices. This tool greatly simplifies the process of comparing costs across different options.
Interestingly, BCBSNC subtitled the announcement "Lack of Cost Transparency Costs US Consumers Billions Each Year -- and that raises a follow-on question: what took so long?
January 16, 2015
From the start of this website, I've thought that it would be great to support an online community interested in health-related topics. Over time, we've realized that many of the forum posts were commercial, and sometimes not relevant. This week, we decided to retire the forums on this site since we don't anticipate having the time and attention in the near future to cultivating an online community.
Hopefully, this site will at some point support online forums again. Until then, we continue to work on a better doctor search.
January 12, 2015
For a while, DocSpot has been trying to do a better job of interpreting user queries. For example, if the user types in "nyc" in the location field, our search service interprets that as "New York City, NY." Some of this translation (especially with regards to the concept search term) had been done automatically without any explanation to the user. To help users better understand the search results, we released changes a few days ago. The search results page now displays the original query, and describes how the terms were interpreted. In some cases, where the search service was unable to find enough results, it explains how it broadened the search.
There are a number of other improvements that we're deliberating for the search results page. If you have any ideas, please let us know.
December 31, 2014
2014 was a great year for DocSpot, and we look forward to continue to improve the website in 2015. As usual, it feels that there is more to do than we have time for, but we're excited about what's ahead.
Happy New Year!
December 27, 2014
It feels like 2014 passed by very quickly.
Hope you had a merry Christmas!