Upcoming changes

Earlier this year, we participated in a contest sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and ProPublica to leverage data from Medicare to help patients select physicians. Health 2.0 announced today that we won first place. We're grateful to the sponsors and organizer, and we're delighted at the result. This was a fun contest to participate in, and we hope to incorporate our work from the contest into our publicly available service.

The key data set that we have not yet integrated into our public website yet is the demographics and conditions data set that Medicare recently released. This data set includes information about the patients that specific physicians treat, aggregated at the physician level (e.g. 15% of Dr. Smith's Medicare patients are Hispanic or 5% have asthma). This detailed information gives patients a powerful tool to help them find physicians that have treated other patients like themselves.

In this context, we were also able to experiment with some innovative ways of visually representing data. We look forward to integrating those displays in the coming months.

Thanks to Ningning for spearheading this effort, and thanks to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ProPublica for their sponsorship!