When deductibles can be problematic
October 19, 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.
October 19, 2014
Previously, I've noted that cost-sharing will actually help with health care costs in the long-term because patients will become more careful about costs. There can be downsides, however. Some medical care (e.g. screening) might save more money in the long-term because they can alert patients and doctors to conditions which are much easier to treat when detected early. High deductibles where patients will need to pay for the entire cost of the screening may cause patients to skip the medical care altogether, as noted in this New York Times article.
What will probably make sense over time will be for certain medical services (along the lines of preventative care) to be more heavily subsidized than other medical care that patients will opt for, regardless of cost (e.g. treating a broken arm). Making it cheaper (and more accessible) to get the preventative care should mean that certain conditions will be detected earlier. Current legislation already requires that wellness visits are entirely covered by insurance. It wouldn't be surprising to see additional forms of medical care being more heavily subsidized by insurance plans.
October 11, 2014
Massachusetts state law now requires insurers to offer pricing information to their members (Kaiser Health News article). This is a tremendous leap towards pricing transparency for a single state. Hopefully, other states will follow. Unfortunately, this information is not public in that at least some insurers require users to log in with their account in order to see pricing information (and so I can't comment on how well implemented the systems are). Nevertheless, this must be far more useful than previously available information in helping people decide where to go for a certain procedure.
It's ironic that it took state law to coerce insurance companies into doing something that is likely going to benefit both consumers and insurers.
October 04, 2014
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released the Open Payments data, which details which companies have given how much to different doctors. We think this is terrific for patients. The underlying concern is that physicians who have received large payments from certain manufacturers have a conflict of interest and might be biased towards that manufacturers' products. Some will counter that physicians abide by a professional ethic that prioritizes the interests of the patients and are above such influences. It seems clear that at least some physicians will be negatively influenced, and it's unclear who would be in the best position to detect that (given, for example, that medical state licensing boards don't systematically review doctors' prescription patterns). In other areas (such as journalism and research), professionals disclose potential conflicts of interest so that others can judge for themselves whether their output has been unduly influenced. The Open Payments program helps move the health care industry in that direction.
Already, there are some criticisms of the data that has been leveled. A basic criticism about the data is that CMS has withheld the unique physician identifiers that they have collected. Thus, for example, there may be some ambiguity as to which Dr. John Smith has received payments. Another criticism is that some of the data is just plain wrong. For example, WSJ posted an article about how one physician was listed as having received more than $150,000 while in actuality received close to $2,000. The source of the error lies with the company that reported the information, but CMS has also stated that it won't update the data set until next year. Both of these criticisms are clearly unfortunate, but still, the Open Payments program is a step in the right direction and will hopefully improve over time.
September 27, 2014
We're planning on upgrading the operating system software on our public server tonight (Saturday, September 27), starting around 10 PM PST. The upgrade might take a few hours, and the server will be unavailable during that time.
We hope you won't be terribly inconvenienced by this outage.
September 20, 2014
I'm David, a new developer at DocSpot, and I'll be working on all-things user-facing. You can split DocSpot's work into two main categories: 1) finding, storing, and organizing information about doctors; and 2) making the information available and useable to people who visit our site. Part two is where I'll be working. I'm excited to roll-out my first project, which is an updated and improved autocomplete feature (the feature that fills in the suggestions when you type an incomplete word in the search bar).
Autocomplete or autosuggest features are nothing new (though I remember it was exciting when Google did it in 2008). DocSpot has had an autocompleting search bar for some time. What I did was change around some code to make it faster, more flexible, and more powerful. For example, the previous version of autocomplete could not suggest doctors' names or names of insurance providers - now those are possible. Autocomplete is a work-in-progress. With a strong foundation, I hope to continue tweaking it and improving it during my time at DocSpot as I take on other development projects.
We like our site, but some features are getting outdated, slow, or need to be improved to keep pace with changing technology. Like autocomplete: we had something but we wanted to make it better for the user. I'm looking forward to making similar improvements in other areas of the site. We can always use input from users so let us know what you think!