Redesigning the search results page
November 21, 2014
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.
November 21, 2014
We've been working on making the search results page easier to understand, and now have a series of incremental changes to roll out over the next month or two.
To kick off this series today, we're releasing some changes to highlight relevant clinical interests. For example, if someone were to search for "diabetes," we might show a provider that has listed "gestational diabetes" as a clinical interest, as we used to do. The change is that now we emphasize that relevant clinical interests, since each provider may have indicated multiple interests. We've also rearranged parts of the provider summaries. We still have many more changes to complete, so stay tuned.
November 15, 2014
For a long time, patients did not have to worry about medical costs, as long as their insurance plan was accepted by their health care providers. This peace of mind turned out to be a huge problem: since patients had no incentive to care about costs, they didn't (this problem is known as the third-party payer problem). Patients might as well have always demanded the best, even if that meant providers who charged the most, equipment that was too costly for its intended function, or unnecessary tests. Along with other factors, this tendency drove health insurance premiums higher and higher. Health insurance premiums kept rising, and people started saying that the rises were unsustainable. Different approaches have been tried over the years, and now, patients are increasingly responsible for a share of their medical costs. This trend gets at one of the underlying causes for increases in health premiums.
An interesting note is that people shopping on exchanges seem to overwhelmingly prefer high-deductible/low-premium plans. The rate of adoption of these plans is significantly lower in the employer market, although still quite sizable. This difference is likely due to people shopping on exchanges are paying with their own money directly. As workers realize that rising health insurance premiums comes at the expense of their take-home pay, I would expect the enrollment in these plans to rise further in the employer market.
November 09, 2014
The New York Times published a follow-up article about how patients receive some unexpected bills even when getting a copy of his own medical records. One patient is reported to have been charged for an office visit when he was told to come in to pick up a copy of his records. Policies vary from office to office, and although providers are legally required to provide copies of medical records at a reasonable cost, "reasonable" means different things to different people. As a result, the cost for patients to get copies of their medical records vary from provider to provider -- similar to the cost of procedures for the uninsured.
It can be difficult to enforce a vague definition of "reasonable," but if all costs were transparent and easily accessible, the market could go a long way in either establishing more concrete policies.
November 02, 2014
Reuters reported on two studies indicating how difficult it can be to book an appointment with a doctor of a certain specialty or when using Medicare Advantage. In particular, over 15% of the doctors were not reachable via the phone numbers listed (e.g. the doctor retired or moved, or the phone number was incorrect), and between 9% and 15% of doctors were not accepting new patients. There is some speculation as to whether these directories were inaccurate because of outright neglect or whether insurance companies knowingly included incorrect listings in order to make the networks seem bigger than they actually were.
Some aspects of this seem relatively easy for insurance companies to solve. For example, they should be able to review claims and notice that a specific doctor has not submitted a claim for months and can follow up to see if that doctor should still be included in the network. Some other aspects can be harder to address: doctors might change whether they are accepting new patients relatively frequently, or they might not be accepting new patients who use a specific insurance (but might still accept that insurance for existing patients). Having an accurate and updated directory will involve effort from both the insurers and providers, and it's easy to see how both might let the project slip in the morass of other priorities. Unfortunately, patients needlessly experience frustration with outdated directories when trying to secure an appointment.
October 26, 2014
DocSpot incorporated over five years ago, and launched a little over four years ago. The service has come a long way. I remember when we first launched, certain queries in certain cities were painfully slow. Since then, we've re-organized the search form and the search results layout a few times each. We've also become far more sophisticated when parsing queries (we used to require people to use separate boxes for different types of searches). We've even released a more sophisticated version of autocomplete that categorizes suggestions. There have been many more updates -- some of which have been visible and some of which have not. All in all, we feel that the service, and the company, have advanced far enough that we've graduated from "beta."
We'll still be working on improving the site. If you have ideas on what we should be working on next, please let us know.